Martin Amis. Racist?
I can’t believe I’ve not been following this little fight from the start. Ronan Bennett’s recent article in G2 denouncing Martin Amis as a racist, has resulted in Hitchens coming to the defense of his friend in an article published in the Guardian today. I think Bennett is absolutely right in his questioning of Amis’s motives and his dubious choice of language at times. What is a ‘thought experiment’ anyway? Is it where you pretend to be a bit racist to test the responses of other people - and only the truly intellectual and enlightened liberal mind can partake of it? Sounds a bit dubious to put it mildly.
But Hitchens equally makes some good points and rather settles this I feel. I think Amis is lucky in this instance to have such an eloquent advocate as Hitchens. Hitchens and Amis would never tolerate the label ‘islamaphobe’. But I think when they express a strong distaste for ‘islamism’, that’s what they are. But this is different from being racist towards all Muslims isn’t it? Or is the distinction irrelevant?
This whole spat started as a dispute between Amis and fellow Manchester University Professor of English Terry Eagleton. Hitchens seems to have taken it as a compliment that Eagleton has expressed disappointment in Hitchens turning out not to be the new George Orwell, but rather the new Evelyn Waugh. Hasn’t he heard, right is the new left?
I think Bennett does a pretty good job of demonstrating how Amis’ rhetoric, like most Islamophobia, veers wildly from pretending to attack “fundamentalism” to attacking Islam generally to attacking funny-looking people who might be Arabs, or something. The real nature of Islamophobia is revealed in just that sort of carelessness.
Hitchens makes “good points”? Where? He serves up a false definition of racism of which to acquit Amis, follows it up with just the kind of lurid montage of Muslim Evil that raises suspicions of Islamophobia in the first place (the montage containing several deceptions and even, dare I say, one stereotypically racist maneuver in the old colonial style — see under “ululating”), pulls a fainting-couch routine over Bennett’s daring to Mention The War (spare me), pretends not to understand that Bennett is accusing Islamophobes (correctly) of muddying the distinction between religion and race, and then talks about his “deep and unalterable convictions” (again, spare me). For bonus points, he claims to have criticized Amis himself in an old review where he really doesn’t (and wherein, moreover, he fellates the thoroughly loathsome Mark Steyn and writes in seriousness about having vowed that he wouldn’t leave the “right line” on Islam to the fascists). If anything, his defense of Amis reveals again what a sad old bullshitter the post-Iraq Hitchens has become.
No, this was a complete unmasking of what Amis, Hitchens and their ilk have become: whisky sodden English nationalists, smug beyond belief when talking about themselves and simply racist when approaching the ‘other’. I agree with Doctor Slack: what were the good points that Hitchens made? It’s just waffle.
Amis made some indefensible comments and for obvious ideological reasons, Hitchens tried to defend him.
A large vocabulary does not indicate moral superiority. Chris Morris’s article on the subject actually summed things up very well, I thought.