Martin Amis keeps rumbling on
To recap the situation, Martin Amis is finally being called to account for his comments of August last year (the day of the liquid air explosives drama] that have feature here many times:What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? 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. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people. It’s a huge dereliction on their part.
There have been three views that most people have taken from this. The first is that by 'there is an urge' Amis means that he has it, and more he assumes it is widely shared 'dont' you', that such a programme needs to be carried out not just on the Muslim community but also on anyone who looks like they are from the Middle East or Pakistan. An urge, but only that. The less charitable interpretation, which I have leaned to, that he is using the formulation 'there's a definite urge' as way of saying what he doesn't wish to say directly, 'I think it should be done'. A third more charitable interpretation is merely that he is, much like Mary Beard, only passing on what he has heard.
A fourth interpretation is given in the comments here. I am not sure I understand it fully, but to the extent I think I do, it is that because of Amis's history of anti-discrimination, any knowledgeable reader would interpret his remarks as being of the form:
Such actions (terrorism) are giving rise to a wish to take collective action against Muslims. But this would be terrible because it would lead to not letting them travel, strip-searching...
In other words a prophecy, not in the 30th January 1939 mould as the harsher critics allege, but to non-Muslims about the risks of giving in to such urges. This interpretation (if I have understood it correctly) is not that obvious. The interviewer didn't read it like that 'This last response is likely to be extremely hardline, inflamingly so, if Amis’s message [ie the quote above - MJT] to me is anything to go by'. One of Amis's best friends, Christopher Hitchens, didn't either, seeing it as a potentially necessary 'extraordinary response' that Mark Steyn would recognise.
Amis himself has replied, once in a letter to an Independent columnist and friend, and second in a letter to The Guardian. The former is here and the paragraph that matters:
The anti-Muslim measures he says I "advocated" I merely adumbrated, not "in an essay" ("he wrote", "wrote Amis" – each of these is an untruth), but in a long interview with the press. It was a thought experiment, or a mood experiment, and the remarks were preceded by the following: "There's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say... [etc, etc]." I felt that urge, for a day or two...There were two additional depressants [to the August plane drama]. At least one of the alleged would-be mass murderers had taken the trouble to convert to Islam, suggesting that the exterminatory virus was about to mutate, like bird flu. And I'm sure you remember, Yasmin, that passengers on this route were suddenly forbidden to take books on the eight-hour flight – a resonant symbolic victory for the forces of ignorance, humourlessness, literalism, boredom and misery. Anyway, the mood, the retaliatory "urge" soon evaporated, and I went back to feeling that we must, of course, build all the bridges we can between ourselves and the Muslim majority, which we know to be moderate.
To the Guardian he wrote:
I was not "advocating" anything. I was conversationally describing an urge - an urge that soon wore off. And I hereby declare that "harassing the Muslim community in Britain" would be neither moral nor efficacious.
So Amis is giving the second explanation, that he said those remarks, and meant them 'a retaliatory urge', but it was only a passing fad. That probably is the correct interpretation - he clearly says in the letter that he does not wish his urge to be put into practice.
Does this get him off the hook? Well probably not. Do most people ever have such an urge? To strip-search completely innocent people merely to punish people that look like them? Even on the day you learnt about the plot to blow up aeroplanes.
It's also worth noting that Amis's concern in the interview was the vast majority of Muslims, not just Islamists. In the same interview he said:
It’s a very chilling thought because the only thing the Islamists like about modernity is modern weapons. And they’re going to get better and better at that. They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.
This has extra resonance currently because of this remarkable interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Reason magazine in which she makes it clear that she believes we are at war with Islam, and that it must be destroyed through various discriminatory measures. It doesn't even seem to be merely an urge in her case. As I have said elsewhere I think as she has had (credible) death threats one can understand she is not going to be very balanced in her view, which is why we must hope she is not representative of a trend.
Update: There is also the Kingsley bit. I think there is a lot of conflicting evidence on the homophobia/racism/sexism (well perhaps not the last), testament to a man who said and did a lot of things. Obviously his views changed on certain subjects throughout his life too. But I think the defence led by his ex-wife and brother-in-law that he was not anti-semitic (although EJH perhaps meant only he was not an anti-semitic-boor), 'Calling him anti-Semitic should be actionable were it not so absurd' is a bit silly. Here's Martin saying he was anti-semitic in private to a certain extent, and in the Daily Telegraph.
posted by Matthew @ 10/12/2007 06:34:00 PM
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