“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