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.