“Socialists have to deal with groups to the right of them all the time, and Islamists are no exception. The irrational demonisation of Political Islam is not a result of class analysis, or revolutionary realpolitik, but of liberal blackmail.”
Richard Seymour on the Left and political Islam at Lenin’s Tomb, 20 October 2007
“We are used to attacks on freedom of speech these days. At present Martin Amis is coming under heavy attack from radical Muslims for his trenchant criticisms of the violence that is inseparable from extreme Islamism….
“In so doing, he has attracted the ire of Professor Terry Eagleton – a mediocre but always modish literary critic. Having, in my view, distorted Amis’s words, Eagleton claimed that the author was ‘hounding and humiliating’ Muslims – and the usual suspects have followed in his wake with shrieks of ‘Islamophobe’ and ‘racist’.
“Amis is neither. For while Islam is one of the world’s great religions, he is surely correct when he says that Islamic extremists are ‘anti-Semites, psychotic misogynists and homophobes’. He has every right to say our society is more evolved than repressive and brutal Muslim states like Saudi Arabia, which is being permitted through political inertia to fund Europe-wide centres peddling the pernicious doctrine of Wahhabism (which promotes global Jihad) to impressionable young men.”
Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Daily Mail, 19 October 2007
For an alternative view, read Soumaya Ghannoushi at Comment is Free, 18 October 2007
The author Martin Amis has claimed he feels “morally superior” to Muslim states which are not as “evolved” as the Western world.
Responding to long-running accusations that he is Islamophobic, Amis launched a fresh invective against the Muslim faith and many of its followers. The 58-year-old defended a proposal he made last year that Muslims be deported and strip-searched in a crackdown on terrorism. His latest comments came in a TV news interview last night and during the Cheltenham Literature Festival last week.
In an interview with Jon Snow on Channel Four News, Amis declared: “I feel morally superior to Islamists, by some distance. There are great problems with Islam. The Koran recommends the beating of women. The anti-Semites, the psychotic misogynists and the homophobes are the Islamists.”
Days earlier, Amis shocked festivalgoers in Cheltenham with claims that Muslim states are less “civilised” than Western society. “Some societies are just more evolved than others,” he said. “These societies are arming themselves with weapons like the AK47 and blowing people up on buses and Tubes.”
When one member of his audience suggested not all Muslims were terrorists he retorted: “No one else is doing it. Here in the West we have the most evolved society in the world and we are not blowing people up.”
Condemning his comments, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain said: “Amis clearly seems to believe many Muslim communities are primitive. But just because some extremists have committed terrorist acts does not give him licence to denigrate an entire faith community. He should be ashamed of himself.”
Watch the Channel 4 interview with Amis here.
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
Terry Eagleton explains his recent much-publicised polemic against Martin Amis and replies to critics:
“In an essay entitled The Age of Horrorism published last month, the novelist Martin Amis advocated a deliberate programme of harassing the Muslim community in Britain. ‘The Muslim community’, he wrote, ‘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…’
“Amis was not recommending these tactics for criminals or suspects only. He was proposing them as punitive measures against all Muslims, guilty or innocent. The idea was that by hounding and humiliating them as a whole, they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man’s law. There seems something mildly defective about this logic….
“Suicide bombers must be stopped forcibly in their tracks to protect the innocent. But there is something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment.”
Here at Islamophobia Watch we are of course rooting for Professor Eagleton. However, in the interests of accuracy, we should point out that Amis’s disgraceful comments in fact appeared in an interview with Ginny Dougary published in the Times Magazine in September 2006.
If Martin Amis, who has just taken up a teaching post at the University of Manchester, should happen to bump into the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton on campus, it could be an uncomfortable meeting. In the new introduction to the 2007 edition of his classic book, Ideology: An Introduction, Eagleton launches an impassioned attack on the views of “Amis and his ilk” who argue that the West needs to clamp down on Islam.
The spur for Eagleton’s criticism is Amis’s assertion that, as the Islamic population swells, “the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order“. Amis has suggested “strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan”, preventing Muslims from travelling, and further down the road, deportation. “Not the ramblings of a British National Party thug,” writes Eagleton, “but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world.”
How liberals lost their anti-racism
Liberal arguments that the West needs to defend “Enlightenment values” lead to a culture of bigotry, writes Arun Kundnani
Socialist Worker, 2 October 2007
A new sentiment has gripped mainstream liberal thinking in Britain over the last few years – one which regards Muslims as uniquely problematic and in need of forceful integration into ‘superior’ Western values.
For this new breed of liberal, previously cherished values of multiculturalism should be discarded, and the fight for racial and religious equality is irrelevant.
The recent publication of Nick Cohen’s book What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way and Andrew Anthony’s more sharply argued The Fall-Out: How A Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence provide the clearest statements yet of what this new liberalism stands for.
Their argument is straightforward – the major problem facing the West is a failure to stand up for its Enlightenment values.
Liberalism has been infected by guilt, they say, which prevents it from defending itself against the threat of Islamism – which is held responsible not only for terrorist violence, but also for ‘Muslim separatism’ in our cities.
“Islamic group accused of al-Qaida link wants to open second school.” What is this – a typical piece of anti-Muslim scaremongering in the Daily Express? A press release by Newham councillor Alan Craig? No, it’s the headline to an article by Riazat Butt in today’s Guardian, reporting on plans by Tablighi Jamaat to open a madrasa for 500 boys as part of the so-called “mega-mosque” development in East London.
Yusuf Smith replies to Nick Cohen’s “extraordinarily conspiracy-minded article” in last Sunday’s Observer.
Rather belatedly, Nick Cohen adds his ten cents to the controversy over the Channel 4 documentary “Undercover Mosque” (for previous coverage see here):
“… the rules governing television documentaries remain incredibly tight. Channel 4 stuck to them. It substantiated every allegation and then gave the people it criticised a right of reply. Even so, the West Midlands police referred it to the television watchdog and, in the process, sent a message to other journalists thinking of exposing religious extremism to back off if they didn’t want the cops on their case as well.
“I could, if I wanted, go into a despairing peroration about a country so blinded by greed and stupefied by relativism it allows its police officers and libel lawyers to turn on those who report on hate-spouting imams.
“Fortunately, there are a few grounds for optimism. Ofcom will rule on Undercover Mosque in a few weeks and it looks like it will dismiss as laughable the West Midlands police’s claims that Channel 4 framed innocent preachers. The 56 hours of film shot by the documentary makers show that the crew didn’t turn tolerant men into howling bigots by using trick camera work and crafty editing but merely reported what its journalists found.”
Has Nick Cohen in fact seen the 56 hours of film, so he can – like the West Midlands Police – make an informed judgement on the accuracy of the programme? Don’t be silly. For Cohen, like many other self-styled defenders of Enlightenment values, when it comes to Islam and Muslims prejudice trumps objective evidence and rational thought goes out the window.