In a letter in today’s Guardian Martin Amis expresses indignation that Terry Eagleton should take exception to his remarks about Muslims.

(Just to remind you what these were: “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”)

As Mart explains: “I was not ‘advocating’ anything. I was conversationally describing an urge….” And in a letter to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Independent he offers a similar defence against Eagleton’s criticisms: “The anti-Muslim measures he says I ‘advocated’ I merely adumbrated….”

So that’s all right then.

For Osama Saeed’s comments, see Rolled Up Trousers, 12 October 2007