SOCIALIST UNITY

General Broulard: Colonel Dax, you’re a disappointment to me. You’re an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot. We’re fighting a war, Dax. A war that we’ve got to win. Wherein have I done wrong?

Colonel Dax: Because you don’t know the answer to that question, I pity you.

COMRADE HORSE YOGHURT

And so the hoopla surrounding Martin Amis continues. Terry Eagleton’s extremely mild comments to the effect that Amis is a bigot and an idiot is still making waves. But why? On This Week, some time ago now, Amis twittered about Islam willing “to take the hit” of a nuclear strike if it meant that it could acquire the bomb itself. Amis (First in English) is seemingly unaware that a religion cannot acquire a bomb. Nevertheless, let’s play this shallow game: Pakistan is in possession of nukes, so where does that leave your argument, Mart?

On Question Time Amis raved that the US has “many good reasons for a causus belli with Iran”, like an Al Qaeda bombing which Iran had nothing to do with, and the American “hostages” held in Tehran in 1979 after the US granted the Shah “political asylum”. I thought nothing of it: Amis is an overrated novelist (goodish here and there but no great shakes). He is not known for his political insights, and This Week and Question Time do have a habit of inviting supremely uninformed folk on to the show – remember the showbiz Sun columnist on Question Time whose answers made the audience cringe and snigger in equal measure? Unfortunately, newspapers can’t help themselves either: they too need to know what Martin thinks.

The last media frenzy surrounded Ziauddin Sardar’s tame but misjudged article, “Welcome to Planet Blitcon”, which presented Amis, McEwan (by the way, his On Chesil Beach is extremely mediocre) and Rushdie as neocons. One really must read Martin Amis’s stuff on Islam, especially his stupid three-part essay on Islam, printed in the Observer, entitled “The Age of Horrorism”, to gauge what a warped and funny individual Amis is. (The last time I found Amis funny was when he placed himself alongside Bellow and Nabokov in literature’s pantheon of prose stylists, which reminded me a great deal of Tom Wolfe placing his “Bonfire of the Vanities” alongside the works of Dickens and Thackeray.) I must say that I found “Horrorism” profoundly interesting in the watching-a-car-crash sort of way. If only a literary version of the Darwin Awards existed, I mused. Indeed, I started to seriously wonder whether Martin Amis actually exists. Perhaps he really is the creation of Craig Brown’s wonderful imagination.

In a long and error-ridden essay for the Observer, Martin Amis starts by announcing his love for humanity but dislike for bin Laden: “All men are my brothers. I would have liked to have said it then, and I would like to say it now: all men are my brothers. But all men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother. At the very best, he is my half-brother - by definition. Osama is not my brother.” Jolly good to know. Each time I stumble across Amis I’m reminded of Brown’s Comrade Horse Yoghurt spoof (I guffawed for a week, crawled into hospital and demanded a general anaesthetic).

For the unbrotherly but very sisterly Amis the world changed on 11 September - “shifts in the paradigm like the attack of 11 September 2001” - and he’s miffed. (Incidentally, for Amis and his liberal bozo friends, there was no “shift in the paradigm” when far worse atrocities occurred elsewhere.) For one, he’s not best pleased that his family has been searched at an airport. Why can’t security, he cogitates, “stick to people who look like they’re from the Middle East”. And what to do if the terrorist is a light-skinned terrorist from Chechnya, other parts of the Caucuses, Bosnia, Kosovo or a white covert for instance? Having since realised that he came across as a fascist goon, Amis has since claimed that he did not mean this seriously and was just, you know, thinking aloud.

But how often does one need to think the same thought aloud? Earlier in the year, in the Times, Amis opined in similar but more menacing fashion: “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? [actually, no] – 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. I suppose they justify it on the grounds that they have suffered from state terrorism in the past, but I don’t think that’s wholly irrational.”

There’s no need to dissect this depraved rant; it suffices to quote it. The only thing that’s missing is Amis demanding Muslims wear badges…Anyway, what’s worth noting is Amis’s eccentric logic: “they hate us” for something he believes is rational (presumably not because of the horny kids on crack); however, “they” must be made to “suffer until it gets house in order” and therefore act in an irrational way. More of Amis’s logic later. No such admonition for the “West” to get “its house in order”, of course.

Even when Amis tries to be profound and visionary, though, he doesn’t quite realise the own-goal he’s scoring: “And I couldn’t defend myself from a vision of the future; in this future, riding a city bus will be like flying El Al”. Martin doesn’t enlighten his readers why it is El Al is like El Al rather than, say, Swiss Air. Or to put it another way, why does Aer Lingus not have Palestinians hijacking their airliners but El Al does? Or is that still more proof of their horrible (or should that be horriblist?) nature? This is some conspiracy: the Palestinians had to anxiously await centuries to be maltreated by Jews so as to put into action a long-planned violent response under the guise of national liberation. That’s some conspiracy theory. One reason Amis can’t accept anything but the most depraved reasoning is his pitiful reading matter: Amis’s lodestone on Islam is, predictably, the deranged Bernard Lewis; his lodestone for terrorism is the liberal clown Paul Berman, a man of comically little insight.

“Until recently,” writes Amis, “it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is ‘a civil war’ within Islam. That’s what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.” The reason Amis does not hear from “moderate Islam” is because he is deaf to all but the most extreme voices. “Islamism”, according to Amis, is the winner in every Islamic country where they barely even register as a force. Even in Pakistan, when elections are held, the Islamists barely register. In Indonesia, the largest Muslim country, the Islamists can only dream of reaching the weak position of their Pakistani comrades. Like Irshad Manji, Martin Amis does not like facts. Or to put it in the language Amis will understand: Facts; Martin Amis like does not.

Like Manji, obligatory but perfunctory references are required for Amis to pose as someone who knows what he’s blathering on about. So he tries to be knowledgeable about Islam: “The Surah [the sayings of the Prophet]…” No, Mart, Surah means chapter; “the sayings of the Prophet” are the Sunnah and are collected in the Hadiths. Amis has problems with even the most well-known words: “intifada (‘earthquake’)”. Wrong again, Mart: it means “shaking off”, although it is commonly accepted to mean “uprising”. Because Amis is so inept at arguing his position, it gets worse, much worse. But there are far too many idiocies to correct. The least I can do is to point out the more glaring ones.

Here Amis tries for overarching political thinking: “And we now know what happens when Islamism gets its hands on an army (Algeria)… the result was fratricide, with 100,000 dead…” Unbelievably, extraordinarily, Amis believes that the death toll in Algeria was the result of Islamist control of the Algerian army. It is clear that Amis does not know anything about the Arab world or Islam, except that he hates it, and because he hates it, he makes utterly stupid claims like Algeria’s army having been under the control of Islamic fundamentalists it was butchering by the thousand. Solely because Amis is who he is, is he allowed swathes of space to twitter, in bigoted fashion, about things he knows nothing. Celebrity seems to be a good enough reason for the Observer to give this amazingly ignorant man space to write thousands of words of complete tripe - and no one at the unobservant Observer noticed this astonishing mistake.

“THE FRESHLY FORTIFIED SUSPICION”

Just when you think Amis can’t descend any further into the intellectual gutter, he digs a hole and leaps into the sewer. Amis has “the freshly fortified suspicion that there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder”. Translation: no one other than someone for a bent for mass-murder (i.e. bloodthirsty psychopaths) would want to become a Muslim – albeit this Nazi-style bigotry is only a “suspicion”. If that’s not enough, Amis meets a Muslim and he determines that this man’s “expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife and my children was something for which he now had warrant.” Amis could tell all this from an “expression” of a man he had just met. This particular gift was previously the preserve of Hitler.

Our historian finds yet another Hitler-Stalin pact, so to speak: “And the flame [of influence] passed from Germany to the USSR” and “So Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin”. Presumably this is the famous Amis wit? How the Nazis or Stalin influenced Islamic thought is Amis’s little secret. Though Amis considers himself some sort of authority on Stalin and evidently has a Nazi-style predilection to races and cultures, the basis for this Hitler-Stalin-Islam nexus seems to be that it sounded too good to be left out. Something this ludicrous can only have come from Mr Clown himself, Paul Berman, Amis’s lodestone.

I discover Mart’s visceral hatred for Muslims in the Times: “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.” “Outnumbered” by Muslims – has Amis been reading Mark Steyn (see my “A Steyn On Humanity”) as well as Hitler?

Amis on the disastrous invasion of Iraq: “still, we should not delude ourselves that the motives behind it were dishonourable”. If the motives were so honourable, Martin, why not enlighten us as to what they were and are? In any case, why is Iraq in the mess it’s in? As ever, Amis has the answer: “It is by now not too difficult to trace what went wrong, psychologically, with the Iraq War. The fatal turn, the fatal forfeiture of legitimacy, came not with the mistaken [untrue] but also cynical emphasis on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction: the intelligence agencies of every country on earth, Iraq included, believed that he had them [untrue]. The fatal turn was the American President’s all too palpable submission to the intoxicant of power. His walk, his voice, his idiom, right up to his mortifying appearance in the flight suit on the aircraft-carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln (‘Mission Accomplished’) - every dash and comma in his body language betrayed the unscrupulous confidence of the power surge.” George Bush’s walk, eh? Dubya’s voice, huh? The dash and comma in George’s body language. And there I was thinking it was the occupation itself. I must stop paying too much attention to that bloody fool Patrick Cockburn. Tune in to those blasted commas and dashes in body language.

Move over Aristotle and Godel, here’s Amis the logician: “The Iraq project was foredoomed by three intrinsic historical realities. First, the Middle East is clearly unable, for now, to sustain democratic rule - for the simple reason that its peoples will vote against it.” Never mind that the “foredoom” is after the fact and in hindsight, the logic is amusing. Iraqis “will vote against” democracy in a democratic election? On each occasion there has been an election in Iraq, Iraqis have come out in extraordinary numbers, braving death, so as to vote against voting? Martin, you have no idea what you’re talking about, do you? Needless to say, Amis is a moronic inferno.

The Islamic world’s problems, writes our talented historian, are due to a “peculiarly Islamist triumvirate (codified early on by [what a surprise] Christopher Hitchens) of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred - the self-righteousness dating from the seventh century, the self-pity from the 13th (when the ‘last’ Caliph was kicked to death in Baghdad by the Mongol warlord Hulagu), and the self-hatred from the 20th.” The entire Islamic world succumbed to “self-pity” after a Mongol kicked the Caliph to death? Or could it be that the Islamic world was shocked by the fact that this same Mongol warlord and his army destroyed and looted Baghdad and then made his way with his goons across the Middle East happily raping and killing hundreds of thousands of people? Is Amis unaware that Iraqis, especially Baghdadis, refer to the Americans as Mongols? Yet anyone who found this Mongol devastation an outrage is guilty of “self-pity”, although Amis will be hard put to find many Muslims today who are obsessed with the Mongol warlord Hulagu. It is appropriate that this absurd “triumvirate” is the product of the same man who blames “theocratic fascism” on the apparent biological fact that “our prefrontal lobes are too small and our adrenaline glands are too big”.

We should, however, expect this perversion of history from Amis. Forget the grand narrative (the “peculiarly Islamic triumvirate”), the poor man purposely distorts historical dates so as to make things a bit sexier. Writing in the Sunday Times, Amis connects the terrorist attacks of September 11 with the defeat of the “armies of Islam” at the “gates of Vienna” in 1683 on – sigh – September 11. There are a few things to be said about this. One, it was September 12, not September 11, that the so-called “armies of Islam” were repelled by the Frankish forces. Two, had Al Qaeda wanted to revenge the defeat, they would not have staged the attack on September 11. This date has meaning in a solar calendar; it has no meaning in the Islamic lunar calendar (the possibility exists that these two dates tally, but the odds are so remote that I’ll eat my spine if they do match). Three, there are any number of Crusader dates that would coincide with U.S. actions in the Middle East. Should we make anything of that?

AMIS THE POLYMATH

There is no beginning to Amis’s talents. He gives psychoanalysis a whirl: “We shouldunderstand that the Islamists’ hatred of America is as much abstract as historical, andirrationally abstract, too; none of the usual things can be expected to appease it. The hatred contains much historical emotion, but it is their history, and not ours, that haunts them.” Psychoanalysis part two: “Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.” Let me get this right. The “hatred” has a “historical” reason yet has no “reason”. Amis’s logic is a joy. Moreover, we should “understand” that the 9/11 terrorists, for example, flew airliners into the Twin Towers, hoping to kill tens of thousands of innocent people, because of “abstract” hatred and “historical emotion”? That Al Qaeda indoctrinates its “soldiers” with appeals to the “abstract”? Has Amis heard of Robert Pape and Scott Atran, not to mention Michael Scheuer (former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit)? They’ve identified the reasons for suicide terrorism – and, strangely enough, “irrationally abstract” hatred does not make an appearance.

Ethics is next on the list for the polymath: “Our moral advantage, still vast and obvious, is not a liability, and we should strengthen and expand it. Like our dependence on reason, it is a strategic strength, and it shores up our legitimacy.” The “moral advantage”, so “vast and obvious”, can be seen in supporting Israel’s destruction of Lebanon and the West’s continued shoring up of the odious Saudi mafia with a multi-billion pound arms sale, to name but two factors making up the “moral advantage” and “our dependence on reason”.

Amis the historian of ideas: “The stout self-sufficiency or, if you prefer, the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture has been much remarked. Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years. And the late-medieval Islamic powers barely noticed the existence of the West until it started losing battles to it. The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. The wheel, as we know, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.” Amis, obviously, means the “extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture” as represented by the totalitarian regimes of today, not the glorious and curious cultures of yesteryear. This is no mere pedantry on my part; this is taking history seriously. The use of the wheel did indeed decline – but in pre-Islamic Arabia, not, as Amis insinuates, after Islam’s triumph of the peninsula.

I have recently corresponded with Professor Richard W. Bulliet, the world’s pre-eminent scholar in this field (author of the groundbreaking “The Wheel and the Camel”). He affirms that “wheels disappeared in the first half of the common era before the rise of Islam” and that preference of the camel over the wheel was simply due to the “intrinsic economy of raising immensely strong animals on low quality desert grazing” and that “camel caravans had the advantage of not requiring much in the way of road upkeep.” That is to say, it was a question of economics.

Bulliet replies that Amis’s argument is “silly” and that “it should be easy to show that Islam has nothing do with any of this. Muslims used wheeled vehicles in Central Asia, India, and China; and the Muslim ladies of Istanbul commonly went on picnics outside of town in parties carried by covered wagons drawn by usually four oxen. This, of course, was a matter of comfort, not of economic efficiency. In temperate climes where cheap camel labour was not so readily available, wheeled vehicles did not disappear.”

Moreover, Bulliet writes: “If Amis had wanted to explore intellectual blinders in this arena, he might instead have noticed that everywhere in the world for the two millennia that preceded the nineteenth century, the two-wheeled vehicles were so much preferred over four-wheeled vehicles that the latter were practically non-existent . . . except in Europe. Europeans have used four-wheeled vehicles for some 5000 years despite obvious and severe inefficiencies in friction, harnessing, steering, braking, and road requirements. ‘The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust’ in Europe, I guess, that they failed to notice that everyone outside of Europe realized that four-wheeled transport really sucked before about 1500.” Bulliet ends with the inspiring, “Good luck on rapping Amis-Lewis knuckles. Their sort of foolishness is so widespread these days that it’s an uphill battle.” Well, I hope I haven’t done too badly, Professor Bulliet. You’ve certainly kicked Amis’s teeth in - or what’s famously left of them.

Given that Amis believes that the Algerian military was under the control of the Islamic fundamentalist movement they were at war with (similarly the U.S. air force is controlled by bin Laden), an “uphill battle” is rather an understatement. The “incuriosity” Amis refers to – or more accurately enforced “incuriosity” by despotic regimes supported by the liberalism he supports – is indeed tragic, but Amis is incapable of reflecting upon the fact that most of the Islamic world is ruled by dictatorships, nearly all of which are backed by the West, and that dictators are prone to censoring speech and anything with a whiff of freedom. It is telling that Amis does not understand this. No wonder Amis believes that the Islamic world “remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel”. Nice to see Amis not doing his homework: Bernard Lewis, rather than Hourani, Hitti, Said, Achcar or Aburish. Lewis’s antipathy for the Islamic world is well-known. Why would Amis resort to quoting Lewis? The answer is fairly obvious: one quotes those who share your own prejudices. As a novelist, Martin was always going to struggle to stay in touching distance of Kingsley; as a bigot, however, Martin is streets ahead of his pa.

Logic, psychoanalysis, ethics and history give way to socio-economics: “In 2002 the aggregate GDP of all the Arab countries was less than the GDP of Spain; and the Islamic states lag behind the West, and the Far East, in every index of industrial and manufacturing output, job creation, technology, literacy, life-expectancy, human development, and intellectual vitality. (A recondite example: in terms of the ownership of telephone lines, the leading Islamic nation is the UAE, listed in 33rd place, between Reunion and Macau.) Then, too, there is the matter of tyranny, corruption, and the absence of civil rights and civil society.” And there we have it (the “too”): “Then, too, there is the matter of tyranny, corruption, and the absence of civil rights and civil society.” The “too” is to be divorced from the tyranny his beloved liberalism bolsters.

There is an insufferable disorder that, unless assiduously guarded against, the middle-aged rich liberal will succumb to, and Amis has been subsumed by the plague of blaming the victim. The “tyranny, corruption, and the absence of civil rights and civil society” is not the cause of the “lag behind the West, and the Far East, in every index of industrial and manufacturing output, job creation, technology, literacy, life-expectancy, human development, and intellectual vitality.” It is the natural concomitant of a country full with Muslims. By Amis’s logic, such as it is, Dubai’s claim to be the richest country in the world is a result of the tyranny in place. Ergo, the riches of Dubai are there for all if only they imitated Dubai’s tyrannical form of government.

It’s disconcerting that Amis couldn’t just be another second-rate novelist and be left to slither away into middle-age and wallow in reactionary politics. A certain mastery of hyperbole has made him a man whose views must be sought on great political matters. If people still want to take seriously someone as extraordinarily stupid and bigoted as Amis clearly is, well, that’s proof of the bigotry and ignorance over the very “reason” and rationality Amis pretends to hold dear. He is an object lesson in unreason and irrationality. Amis can inform his listeners how Islamists came to power in Algeria when they didn’t. How these Islamists got hold of a military when they didn’t. How these Islamists unleashed this military on unsuspecting Algerians, er, when they didn’t. But the last word should go to Amis. On page 82 of his memoir “Experience” Martin informs us: “My mouth wasn’t any good at knowing when to stop”. Quite so.

I wish to thank Professor Richard W Bulliet for his insightful comments. Other than the quotes attributed to him, he is not responsible for any errors of fact or the opinions stated.