Muslims, Anti-Muslims and the theatre of the absurd at Yahya Birt

Sometimes the best way to deal with a loudmouth (Martin Amis), nothwithstanding Terry Eagleton’s or Ronan Bennett’s valiant efforts, is to send him up. Chris Morris provides a masterclass here, noting striking similarities between Martin Amis and Abu Hamza. It really cheered me up: it will cheer you up too.

It’s salutary to note that the University of Manchester seems
to cashing in on the whole thing by hosting Amis and Ed Husain on
“Literature and Terrorism”
next Monday. (Presumably the novel idea here is to get the protagonists
to mostly agree with each other, for Amis’s
“horrorism” to find confirmation in a Muslim echo chamber.
I hope I am proved wrong.) Holding this event seems to isolate Eagleton
(Amis’s departmental colleague) or anyone else at the University who has taken a stand against those who can’t control those little urges to voice thought experiments
in “collective punishment”. Even the “good”
Muslims, delusional children who contend that their primitive faith
might approximate to true, rational, liberal values, can
be condescended to as useful-enough idiots against the jihadis, even if
one must put up with their “gobbledegook”. If some want to argue that the only really good Muslim is an ex-Muslim (i.e. only Ayaan Hirsi Ali has really got it right), then is it really any surprise that polling keeps showing that large numbers of Muslims think that the “war on terror” is “a war on Islam”?

A sure sign of a hostile and prejudicial climate is the repeated claim that it doesn’t exist or even that being prejudiced is a badge of honour (because it doesn’t really exist).