The "problem of the alien"

Ronan Bennett today delivers a stinging rebuke to the novelist Martin Amis for the latter's anti-Muslim bigotry, and to the political class in general for its acceptance (if not encouragement) of Amis' racism.

"What do you make of the following statement: "Asians are 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." While we're at it, what do you think of this, incidentally from the same speaker: "The Black community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order." Or this, the same speaker again: "I just don't hear from moderate Judaism, do you?" And (yes, same speaker): "Strip-searching Irish people. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole Irish community and they start getting tough with their children.""

"The speaker was Martin Amis and, yes, the quotations have been modified, with Asians, Blacks and Irish here substituted for Muslims, and Judaism for Islam - though, it should be stressed, these are the only amendments. Terry Eagleton, professor of English literature at Manchester University, where Amis has also started to teach, recently quoted the remarks in a new edition of his book Ideology: An Introduction. Amis, Eagleton claimed, was advocating nothing less than the "hounding and humiliation" of Muslims so "they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man's law"."

[DW - When Amis responded to Eagleton's criticisms by saying "Can I ask him [Eagleton], in a collegial spirit, to shut up about it?", was it just me who sensed a hint of a desperate plea behind the bluster? As in "can I ask him, please pretty please, to stop exposing my grubby middlebrow bigotry for what it is?"]

"Why did writers not start writing [in response to Amis' racism]? There is Eagleton and there is the Indian novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra, who took apart Amis's strange and chaotic essay on the sixth anniversary of 9/11. But where are the others? Four days after the Pentagon and the twin towers were attacked, the novelist Ian McEwan wrote on these pages: "Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality." As an expression of outraged, anguished humanism, McEwan's formulation was truthful, moving and humbling, and can hardly be bettered. But it seems to me the compassion is flowing in one direction, the anger in another. I can't help feeling that Amis's remarks, his defence of them, and the reaction to them were a test. They were a test of our commitment to a society in which imaginative sympathy applies not just to those like us but to those whose lives and beliefs run along different lines."

"And I can't help feeling we failed that test. Amis got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it."

Read the rest here. Also on the same subject, see this report showing that the socio-political attitudes of Muslim Londoners are every bit as liberal as those of non-Muslim Londoners. Perhaps Amis or some other self-styled "Enlightenment liberal" critic of "Islamofascism" could explain how their well developed rationality computes these particular empirical facts?