Islamophobia: the bigotry you can vent without shame

Yesterday evening, Channel 4 showed a wonderful documentary, "Dispatches: It Shouldn't Happen to a Muslim", an example of that rare and precious thing called public service broadcasting. It is my view that every last person responsible, from the tea-boy up, should be given a knighthood. At least.

Journalist Peter Oborne investigated "the rise of violence, intolerance and hatred against British Muslims....He discover[ed] that for many in the Muslim community, Britain is becoming a very frightening place. Dispatches [met] a range of British Muslims who now live in daily fear, some because their homes are constantly vandalised, others because they or family have suffered devastatingly violent attacks."

The Language of Hate

Some important and authoritative research was commissioned by the film-makers, which will serve as valuable resources for those fighting Islamophobia in the future. There's a report by the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, which found that "the bulk of [press] coverage of British Muslims - around two thirds - focuses on Muslims as a threat (in relation to terrorism), a problem (in terms of differences in values) or both (Muslim extremism in general)." "Decontextualisation, misinformation and a preferred discourse of threat, fear and danger, while not uniformly present, were strong forces in the reporting of British Muslims in the UK national press."

The Cardiff School of Journalism report is a very solid bit of social science research and well worth reading in full. Like the documentary as a whole, it provides a thorough analysis of how a dangerous bigotry is constructed and maintained in public discourse. The British press is shown to constantly present Muslims as an alien presence; a threatening "other". Rarely if ever in the coverage is it accepted that if a person lives, works, votes, pays their taxes and abides by the law in this country then they are no less British if they are a Muslim than if they are CofE or anything else. Instead, Islamic traditions are presented as a threat to a nebulous concept called "our way of life", from which British people of Islamic faith are excluded by definition. It is clear that, for the press, "Britishness" means a narrow concept of white Anglo-Saxonism; and that should be a cause for concern to a great many of us besides Muslims.

The other point about the press coverage is that so much of it is simply false, to the point where it appears that many journalists are in the business of systematically lying about the subject. It becomes plain that the assumption you should work from when you see a scare-story about Muslims in the gutter press, or even the broadsheets, ("Muslims Ban Christmas", "Mosques Beat Churches", "Gay Muslim Paedophile Asylum Seekers May Cause Cancer/Fall in House Prices") is that the story is probably false.

Furthermore, "Oborne conclude[d] that in today's climate the media say things about Islam and Muslims they would never say about other groups [and this includes supposedly liberal commentators like Polly Toynbee]. When he replace[d] the word' 'Muslim' in some recent headlines with 'Jews', 'Blacks' and 'Gays' and show[ed] them to members of the public, they [found] those headlines deeply offensive".

A particularly interesting moment came when Oborne interviewed Rabbi Pete Tobias, a expert in the anti-semitism of early twentieth century Britain. Tobias showed Oborne an Evening Standard article from 1911, a time when many Jews were arriving in the UK from Europe. The language was familiar: dangerous and backward people from the east threaten our values and way of life by swamping our communities and refusing to integrate or submit to our superior culture. Chilling to consider that, even after the twentieth century, the essential components of racist discourse are still not being recognised for what they are (see the election of the lovable clown Boris Johnson, for a separate example).

Crucially, the documentary gave many British Muslims the chance to speak for themselves, which makes a change from having other people talking about them. And their responses to the prejudice that had been thrown their way were the best and most telling of all. Asked about the Sun's political editor's comment that it is correct to spotlight Muslims because of Islamist terrorism, one Muslim cleric asked, if all rapists are men, then why don't we spotlight the entire male gender for the issue of rape? A Muslim medical student said that when Muslims like her get abused or attacked by white British people then no one asks broad questions about the defects of white British culture, but when a Muslim commits a terrorist act then every member of the Islamic faith is held guilty of hate-filled extremism until proven innocent.

This gets right to the crux of it. In reality, we do not have a problem with Islam; we have a problem with terrorists. Actually, we have a problem with terrorism and with bigotry towards Muslims, which often manifests itself in Muslims being violently terrorised.

Terrorising Muslims

The documentary makers commissioned a poll, one of the most important results of which illustrated the fact that Islamophobia does a lot worse than hurt people's feelings. Fully thirty seven percent of Muslims - over one in three - says they have been subjected to hostility or abuse since 7 July 2005 because of their religion. Oborne interviewed people who had had their houses and cars vandalised, been abused in the street, beaten and stabbed, and targeted by fire-bombings.

The information pamphlet accompanying the programme (also well worth a read), describes an incident where "[o]n Wednesday 7 May 2008 in Bolton a group of young people allegedly chased a group of Muslim men shouting racial and religious abuse. A chainsaw was allegedly held to the throat of one man. A 17-year-old girl and a 22-year-old man have been charged with affray and possession of an offensive weapon, and are awaiting trial". Elsewhere "[a] Methodist chapel being converted into an Asian community centre in Quenchwell, near Carnon suffered an Islamophobic attack in early June. In the wake of a local row about the plans to create an Asian centre at this location urine was found inside a builder’s helmet. The words “Fuck off you Asian bastards” were written on a table. On the morning of Monday 2 June a pig’s head was found nailed to the door in a clear attempt to offend Muslims. The words “God says fuck off” and a cross were daubed on the door".

"On 17 April three men were jailed for three years for a campaign of racial harassment lasting nine months against a Muslim colleague, Amjid Mehmood, who was tied to railings and force-fed bacon, which he cannot eat because of his religious beliefs. His attackers filmed the whole incident on a mobile phone. In total, nine separate incidents of racial harassment occurred over the period. A rucksack with protruding wires was put on his locker and his trousers were set on fire. During the Birmingham riots he was driven to an Afro-Caribbean area and told locals were “coming to get him.”"

Its never been a secret that the language of racism is spoken with fists and knives as much as it is written in newsprint or insinuated in the statements of politicians. But many powerful people seem happy to ignore this, while the costs are paid by ordinary and entirely innocent Britons of Islamic faith. Violence is of course the logical consequence of a public discourse in which Muslims are constantly demonised and lied about. Thus, the self-styled victims of fictional Muslim aggression become the enablers of actual aggression against Muslims. The press and politicians (like the odious Jack Straw whining about how veiled women discomfort him, or any given right-wing hack complaining about "political correctness gone mad") portray themselves as the pitiful victims of extremist Islamism. But when Muslims then suffer actual physical aggression as a result of this demonisation, politicians and the press have nothing to say.

Attitudes: differences and similarities

The poll also shows, as other polls have done, that Muslims are not significantly less tolerant than non-Muslims, which sweeps away at a stroke the fantasy of an ultra-conservative Islamist invasion. So we can expect the press to ignore that completely, since it doesn't fit with the approved story.

Speaking generally, the poll results highlight the sorts of differences in perceptions of Islamophobia that you'd probably expect between Muslims and the rest of the population, which are certainly dismaying, and a serious level of prejudice obviously exists. But I hope I'm not being panglossian in saying that this prejudice is also not as widespread as it could be, given the nature of press coverage and elite political discourse. Note for example that 78 per cent of Muslims and 70 per cent of non-Muslims agree that "there is more ... religious prejudice against Muslims in Britain today since the London bombings in July 2005". Most non-Muslims felt that Muslims were bearing the brunt of unjustified criticism (51 per cent) while 31 per cent felt that the level of criticism was justified. When you subtract the decent people who have just been misled by politicians and the press (and would probably change their minds when presented with the facts) from that third of the population, then you're left with a small minority of bigots. Which is not to say that a small minority of bigots can't be very dangerous, but it does help to put a rather frightening picture of British Islamophobia in some sort of context. In a way, it shows what polls often show, that the public are largely decent and reasonable people, and that the political class (media and politicians) is broadly to the right of the general population. Islamophobia is propagated by the political class and a potentially small minority of the public; making it dangerous, but not invincible.

The political utility of hate

Finally, I'd like to make a point that wasn't made in the documentary but which I think is essential for putting all of this in context. We should bear in mind the central, enabling role that Islamophobia plays in the War on Terror, and the potential usefulness to the political class of this species of bigotry.

The documentary aired 3 years to the day after the London tube and bus bombings. As I wrote at the time, the security services had repeatedly warned the government that Britain's involvement in the invasion of Iraq strongly increased the chances that attacks like this would occur. The government joined the US invasion of Iraq - a country that posed no threat to us - in spite of these warnings. It is a truism that one is responsible for the predictable consequences of ones actions, so on the afternoon of 7/7/2005 the British government had a serious problem, as indeed did the media that had played a key enabling role in taking the country to into an unpopular war. It was then extremely convenient for these elites to change the subject from Western foreign policy, the known inspiration for these brutal terrorist crimes, and instead place the focus on the Muslim community. And when you observe the people who run our country first starting a war of aggression that has by now claimed probably over a million lives, and then passing the blame for one of the predicted consequences of that war onto one of the most vulnerable communities in the UK (many of whom had actually voted New Labour, incidentally), then you get the measure of the sheer moral bankruptcy of British ruling elite.

It should also not be forgotten that the demonisation of Islam plays a broader enabling role for Western foreign policy. As I noted in this article, which I wrote in response to the controversy over the Danish cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad:

"It is no coincidence that those who most enthusiastically peddle the fiction of a "clash of civilisations" also portray the opposing "other" as a force that seriously threatens to destroy "our way of life", and therefore advocate an aggressive US-led military strategy across the Islamic world. Manichean rhetoric eulogizing the liberal idealism of "our values" and the necessity of defending them against those who "hate our freedoms" has been the very essence of Western pro-war advocacy in recent years. Observing essentially imperial foreign policies being depicted as altruistic endeavours aimed at bringing enlightenment to backward, inferior (if exotic) cultures, or at least at defending us against them, hardly places us in unfamiliar territory. Indeed, subjugation almost invariably goes hand in hand with the deliberate dehumanisation of those who are being subjugated by those responsible for or whose acquiescence is essential to the act of subjugation".

As competition escalates for strategic control over the planet's dwindling oil reserves, the need for our esteemed leaders to present aggressive imperial policies in Western Asia within the conceptual framework of a "clash of civilisations" will only increase. Violence against innocent people on the streets of Britain will be but one lamentable but neccessary byproduct of this propaganda campaign, along with the massive violence meted out to the people of the region and the predictable terrorist backlash against our own country. Such are the calculations made by the statesmen who run the world on our behalf.

Conclusion

But while the documentary did not place British Islamophobia into this broader context, it should still be applauded for giving such serious treatment to an important subject, and for speaking out with a strong moral voice against this dangerous tide of hatred. Hopefully before too long, Islamophobia will go the way of anti-semitism and anti-black racism, becoming seen as something you at least don't say out loud, as a prelude to it and those other forms of bigotry disappearing forever. If that is to happen, then people like Peter Oborne and the Dispatches team will have played their part. If only more of their peers could say the same.

Boris Johnson: lovable clown

Boris Johnson, eh? You've got to laugh haven't you?

First one of his advisers says that black Britons who don't welcome the new London mayor's election victory should "go if they don't like it here".

Then Tory activists everywhere (that's David Cameron's Cuddly New Tories) are incandescent ..... because the adviser gets sacked. Clearly political correctness has gone so completely mad that you can't even tell black people to go back where they came from without being called a racist. Its a bit like Stalinism, probably.

Then Johnson makes it very clear that the adviser's done nothing wrong in his eyes, and has only been sacked for political expediency. The poor lamb was clearly the victim of entrapment, and was actually forced by a mischievous journalist to tell black people to "go if they don't like it here". Furthermore, any suggestion that he's a racist - based on mere evidence and not the fact that he says he isn't - is a vicious, irresponsible slur. Doubtless some of his best friends are machete-weilding piccaninnies who should f**k off back to Africa.

ah, Boris. With his funny hair and his "cripes" and his "crumbs" and his "oh golly, have I let it slip yet again that I see black people as worth a little bit less than other human beings?". You've got to laugh, haven't you?

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)

Martin Luther King was assasinated 40 years ago today.

Most people know of Dr King's early battles against discrimination in the Southern states, but fewer are aware of how his thinking developed in the latter part of his life. By 1967, Dr King was tying his critique of racism in American society into a broader social critique that encompassed the role of Western economic and state power - then imposing itself as ruthlessly on Vietnam as it is today in Iraq.

This was crystallised in his awesome speech of April 1967, at the Riverside Church, Manhatten.

King said that the US was in Vietnam, not to liberate it, but "to occupy it as an American colony". He roundly condemned his government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today". The Vietnamese, he said, "must see Americans as strange liberators", describing the US record of denying Vietnamese independence, including support for "one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem [for Iraq, read former US-UK favorite Saddam Hussein]"

He continued:

"Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy....They watch as we poison their water...They wander into the hospitals, with at least 20 casualties from American firepower for each Viet Cong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children...How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem, and charge them with violence while we pour new weapons of death into their land?....Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases...We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers"

And then King went further, identifying the war as "but a symptom of a far deeper malady...[a] pattern of suppression". He warned that "We will be marching and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy...When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered". Describing "the Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them", King warned that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death".

Lets be under no illusions. King would have been sickened by the Iraq war, and would have seen through the nonsense of "liberal interventionism" in an instant. Members of the political class on both sides of the Atlantic will spend today, in their public utterances, trying to borrow a part of the great man's legacy for themselves. But how many among them would be able to give a speech like the one King gave at the Riverside Church?

Rest in peace.

Enlightenment or unreason? William Dalrymple and British neo-conservativism

Last summer I had the pleasure of reading William Dalrymple's "The Last Mughal", an account of the siege of Delhi during the Indian rebellion of 1857. I could write a lengthy eulogy on this brilliant and highly readable book, but for now I'll mention two aspects of it that made a particular impression on me at the time.

One was the sheer quantity of research that Dalrymple had undertaken. It was plain that he had spent an extraordinary amount of time carefully mining the historical record to get at the truth of what took place in those fateful months when Britain’s empire on the subcontinent was brought to the brink of destruction. Many of the primary sources he drew upon were seeing the light of day for the first time as a result of Dalrymple's efforts, making this a truly original scholarly contribution.

The book is enlivened in particular by a treasure trove of first-person testimonies, revealing how events appeared at the time to those who lived through them. Letters and diary entries make up a large percentage of the text, to the extent that Dalrymple is mostly just allowing the protagonists to tell their own story. This is the second important point about the book. I can think of few writers barring Edward Said whose work is characterised to such a profound degree by their respect for humanity and their genuine empathy for others. In allowing the subjects of his research to speak for themselves, and in allowing the human qualities of all to inform the narrative, Dalrymple ensures that his readers are informed by the full complexity of the situation and granted an opportunity to empathise with figures from all sides of the story.

Dalrymple's diligent scholarship, his willingness while in search of the truth to accept whatever complexities and contradictions he encounters, and the value he places above all on the humanity of those whose lives he is studying, are the qualities that, for me, really make "The Last Mughal" an exceptional work of history. It is these virtues that provide the foundation upon which he is able to apply the light touches of observant and insightful analysis that from time to time cause you to look up from the pages and spend a few moments reflecting upon what you have just learnt. The best books are those that leave you feeling that your understanding of the world has been enhanced substantively. This, more so than most, is that kind of book.

I mention this now having just come across two book reviews that Dalrymple has written for The Times which highlight vividly the dissonance between his own approach to trying to understand the world and that employed by the broad neo-conservative tendency that has dominated US-UK foreign policy since at least 11 September 2001. The reviews are for "The Second Plane" by Martin Amis, and "Celsius 7/7" by Michael Gove. It is appropriate that Dalrymple should be the person to review these books since the contrast between them and his own works could not be greater. Their principal qualities are apparently the polar opposites of those evident in his own writing: first, an almost embarrasing ignorance of their subject matter, and second, an belligerent refusal to attempt to understand the very people - radical Islamists - that they purport to be presenting an analysis of.

This central contradiction does not escape Dalrymple and, presented as he is with two pieces of work that so thoroughly violate his own intellectual principles, he sets about dismantling them in the careful, insightful manner that we have come to expect from him. He argues that the qualities which made Amis a great novelist, such as his "taste for the extreme and grotesque", are the same qualities that render his political writing self-indulgent and lacking in nuance. "The result", says Dalrymple is a book that "is not just flawed, but riddled with basic misunderstandings". For Amis, unlike Dalrymple, has apparently undertaken little or no scholarly effort to gain a detailed knowledge of his chosen subject matter or to seriously engage with the humanity, however warped and pathological, of the Islamist terrorists he decries. Their alleged fetishisation of death, their sexual frustration, are not qualities that Amis has discovered through reasoned, careful enquiry. They are simply the products of his own lurid imagination.

Dalrymple notes that "Only in one place in the book does Amis actually come across a living Muslim. Arriving at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem after it has closed for the night, he tries to talk his way into the enclosure, and is rebuffed by the guard. “I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper’s face,” he [Amis] writes, “when I suggested . . . that he . . . let me in anyway. His 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.”

"This hysterical reaction", comments Dalrymple, "and the strong whiff of racial prejudice it gives off, is smelled again and again throughout this book."

The same disinterest both in the factual record and in the complex realities of human nature is found in Michael Gove's "Celsius 7/7" - the title a cringe-inducingly pompous little-Englander pun on "Farenheit 9/11", the anti-war film by Michael Moore. My familiarity with Dalrymple’s genial and understated writing style made his palpable scorn for Gove all the more powerful: "A prominent example of the sort of pundit who has spoon-fed neo-con mythologies to the British public for the past few years is Michael Gove. Gove has never lived in the Middle East, indeed has barely set foot in a Muslim country. He has little knowledge of Islamic history, theology or culture — in Celsius 7/7, he just takes the line of Bernard Lewis on these matters; nor does he speak any Islamic language. None of this, however, has prevented his being billed, on his book’s dust-jacket, “one of Britain’s leading writers and thinkers on terrorism”."

"Gove’s book", Dalrymple continues, "is a confused epic of simplistic incomprehension, riddled with more factual errors and misconceptions than any other text I have come across in two decades of reviewing books on this subject"; errors and misrepresentations which Dalrymple then goes on to list in depressing detail.

But the crucial point that Dalrymple makes is that "none of this would matter if Gove were still ring-fenced within his op-ed-page padded cell; horrifyingly, however, he now sits in the Conservative shadow cabinet and is credited with having influence on Conservative policy in the region. Worse still, this book was named as the one most taken by British MPs on their summer holidays. Blair was bad enough, the blind leading the blind; now it seems the madmen are taking over the asylum".

Indeed. Blair's demise does not necessarily mark the end of neo-conservatism's malign influence. It was reported in Jasper Gerrard's interview of Gove published in the Observer last January that none other than "Gordon Brown [had] stopped to congratulate [Gove] on his hawkish work [i.e. "Celsius 7/7"]". The Gerrard interview itself is positively toe-curling in its obsequiousness, describing Gove, hilariously, as a "rigorous intellectual" and a "sharp debater" whose "deadliest tactic is to sound sympathetic while tearing your argument to shreds" ('with what?' one wonders). But this is par for the course in the once liberal now staunchly neo-conservative Observer, which also offers the likes of Amis, Andrew Anthony and Nick Cohen page after page upon which to break wind at length on subjects - Western liberalism and political Islam – that they show a singular failure to understand in any serious way.

Dalrymple's point is well made. The madmen are indeed taking over the asylum. Ill informed, even quasi-racist views emanating from the fetid depths of the British neo-conservative imagination are hailed even by ostensibly liberal members of the political class as brilliant visions of moral clarity. After the catastrophe of Iraq, the dangers posed by governments seized with this sorts of chauvinistic hallucinations should hardly need to be explained. And yet, here we are, with so many in positions of power having apparently learnt nothing from the past 6 years of bloody disaster.

It seems to me that the appropriate response to this can be found if we return to what I described at the beginning of this article: the approach taken by Dalrymple in his own writings. Because it is he, rather than the self-proclaimed neo-conservative champions of Western civilisation that is the true heir to the Enlightenment values of open enquiry and the worth of the human being above all else. And it is by utilising those same values in our own political activity (be that on a personal or a public level) that we are able to counteract the dangerous fantasies of those who are forever imagining a world gripped by some Manichean struggle between the white knights of western civilisation and some barbarous horde from the east (led, invariably, by the latest incarnation of Hitler).

Such fantasies inevitably evaporate when confronted with reasonable representations of the truth, as is evident from Dalrymple's reviews of Gove and Amis's turgid efforts, which he blows away with a casual ease. Ultimately, in the political battles of our times, Enlightenment values will indeed prevail over the forces of unreason. Just not quite in the way that British neo-conservatives would imagine.

Liberalism in 'Londonistan'

My new article, "Liberalism in 'Londonistan'", is published by UKWatch. An excerpt:

"Much has been heard from Britain’s political class in recent years about the role of “values” in the fight against terrorism. The problem, we are told, is that the Muslim community in the UK is failing to integrate with British society and accept our nation’s intrinsic liberalism."

"The message has been imparted to us in several ways. According to a recent study, over 90 per cent of the articles referring to Muslims or Islam in British newspapers on a typical week presented the religion and its adherents in a negative light. The picture presented by the media was of a strict and irreconcilable dichotomy between Islam and British “values”, with the former posing a serious threat to the latter. "

"[However] According to a recent poll, 96 per cent of London’s Muslims, along with 97 per cent of Londoners as a whole, “think that everyone should respect the law in Britain”; 89 per cent of Muslims and 88 per cent of all Londoners “believe that everyone in Britain should be free to live their lives as they want so long as they do not prevent others from doing the same”; 94 per cent of Muslims and 92 per cent of all Londoners “believe that everyone in Britain should have equal opportunities”; 95 per cent of Muslims and 86 per cent of all Londoners “think everyone should be free to practise their religion openly”; and 86 per cent of Muslims and 91 per cent of all Londoners “also think it is important that the Metropolitan Police work closely with communities such as the Muslim community to deter terrorist attacks”."

Read the whole thing here.

Also on this topic, see my "Are Muslims from Mars and Europeans from Venus?" and "Understanding Britain".

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?