You are in:
You've Been Hitched
Reading a blogger giving a reporter a thorough "Fisking" is one of the great pleasures of the Internet. Sometimes, however, you just have to leave it to the professionals.
Check out the Guardian today for Christopher Hitchens' demolition of Ronan Bennett's attack on Martin Amis.
Hitchens is delighted that literary critic Terry Eagleton, who launched the first assault on Amis for his alleged "Islamophobia", also had a crack at him. Here's his response:
"In the same essay that initially attacked Amis, Eagleton also slammed me for disappointing him and not, after all, becoming the George Orwell of my generation. I have instead, he snorts, become the Evelyn Waugh! How is one to come to grips with a man so crude in his sneers that his idea of an insult is to compare me to one of the greatest novelists of the past century?"
In the newspaper's letters page, novelist Ian McEwan also writes in defence of Amis. "I've known Martin Amis for almost 35 years, and he's no racist", writes McEwan. "When you ask a novelist or a poet his or her view of the world, you do not get a politician's or a sociologist's answer. You may not like what you hear, but reasoned debate is the appropriate response, not vilification by means of overheated writing, an ugly defamatory graphic, and inflated, hysterical pull-quotes."
"Ronan Bennett (Shame on us, G2, November 19) insists that because religion is "also about identity, background and culture, and Muslims are overwhelmingly non-white", to criticise this thought system is "Islamophobic", and therefore racist. This is an old ploy, familiar to the extremes of the political left and right, of attempting to close down debate. Seventy years ago, a critic of the Soviet Union could expect to be called a fascist. Something of the same spirit prevails today in relation to Islam, especially in the pages of the Guardian."
Bennett's column, which claims that we should feel "shame" for allowing Amis to get away with his remarks on Islamists, can be read here.
Footnote: Speaking of Bennett. The novelist, screenwriter and best pal of the Guardian's editor is still listed as a Member of the Provisional IRA on Wikipedia. In 1970s Northern Ireland, Bennett was held, convicted and later acquitted of murder and, a few years later, acquitted of charges of conspiracy to cause explosions on the British mainland. Someone ought to tell him to get on Wikipedia's case.
The above is worth mentioning because in his criticism of Bennett, Hitchens corrects him on his claim that the Irish in Britain felt under siege because of the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act: "I might have preferred him to mention that it was also the Provisional IRA, and not just the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act, that left "the Irish community in Britain feeling like a suspect nation"."
