“Last week Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch polemicist, spoke to a gathering of what The Spectator called ‘Britain’s biggest brains – politicians, editors, academics’. She told them that they were ‘actually at war, not just with Islamism, but with Islam itself’. Apparently, a good Muslim has no choice but to strive ‘to establish Sharia law’. Martin Amis, too, has recently informed us that moderate Muslims, if they ever existed, have lost out to radicals in Islam’s civil war. In any case, Islam is ‘totalist’: ‘There is no individual; there is only the umma – the community of believers.’ Never perhaps in history has so much nonsense been so confidently peddled about a population as large and diverse as this planet’s billion-plus Muslims.”
Pankaj Mishra in the Guardian, 8 December 2007
The novelist Martin Amis has fired another shot at Islam by condemning the “abject failure” of Muslims to denounce suicide bombings.
Martin Amis responds indignantly to 
Joan Smith offers her contribution to the “debate” (read: opportunity to incite further hostility towards Islam and Muslims) over the Gillian Gibbons case:
“I recently attended a debate entitled ‘Is Islam good for London? … It wasn’t just me who found the title, tone and content of the debate disturbing. The liberal rabbi, Pete Tobias, described it as a ‘damaging and hurtful exercise’, sinisterly reminiscent of the campaign a century ago to alert the population to ‘the Problem of the Alien’ – namely the Eastern Jews fleeing persecution who had found refuge in the capital.