{"id":202,"date":"2007-12-03T02:22:13","date_gmt":"2007-12-03T07:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/?p=202"},"modified":"2009-03-17T02:25:55","modified_gmt":"2009-03-17T07:25:55","slug":"i-think-martin-has-suffered-terribly-at-the-hands-of-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2007\/12\/03\/i-think-martin-has-suffered-terribly-at-the-hands-of-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"“I think Martin has suffered terribly at the hands of the Guardian”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nMartin being Martin Amis, the quote<\/a> being from his writer pal Ian McEwan, refering to Mart’s growing reputation as a racist and\/or Islamophobe, because of remarks like these<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n\"caricature<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWhat can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There\u2019s a definite urge \u2013 don\u2019t you have it? \u2013 to say, \u2018The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.\u2019 What sort of suff\u00ad\u00ader\u00ad\u00ad\u00ading? Not letting them travel. Deportation \u2013 further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they\u2019re from the Middle East or from Pakistan\u2026 Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs \u2013 well, they\u2019ve got to stop their children killing people. It\u2019s a huge dereliction on their part. I suppose they justify it on the grounds that they have suffered from state terrorism in the past, but I don\u2019t think that\u2019s wholly irrational. It\u2019s their own past they\u2019re pissed off about; their great decline. It\u2019s also masculinity, isn\u2019t it?\u201d\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nMcEwan, who is slightly but not much less nuts than Amis on this subject seems to blame the Guardian for publishing articles like the age of horrorism<\/a> rather than Amis for opening his gob in the first place, which seems a bit unfair. The man himself meanwhile has hit back at his critics with a spectacularly incoherent piece in, you guessed it, the despised Guardian itself<\/a>:\n<\/p>\n

\nI want to talk about the discourse, and about the kind of public conversation we should be hoping to have. But before I do that, I will pay my Islamic readers – and I know I have a few – the elementary courtesy of saying that I DO NOT “ADVOCATE” ANY DISCRIMINATORY TREATMENT OF MUSLIMS. AND I NEVER HAVE. And no one with the slightest respect for truth can claim otherwise.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nHas he read his earlier remarks quoted above, or does he think that if he denies them hard enough they will go away? Because, you know, that blaming of an entire population for the acts of a few seems awfully close to racism to me, especially considering the context. Ever since the September 11 attacks Amis has left no opportunity unused to discuss his disgust at the ideology behind it and over time he has done so in increasingly general terms, culminating in that awful “Age of horrorism” article which came very close indeed in blaming all of Islam for the misdeeds of September 11.\n<\/p>\n

\nSo is Amis a racist? Not in the sense that he’ll be sticking burning crescents on the council estates of Birmingham perhaps, but at the very least he’s an arrogant, self-absorbed ignorant blowhard who mistakes his regurgitation of whichever book he last read for insight. Very telling indeed in this context is the second paragraph of his “I’m no racist, honest” piece, which begins with “When I was five or six years old, my father took me to meet a black man.” That’s the level of self-absorption we’re dealing with here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Martin being Martin Amis, the quote being from his writer pal Ian McEwan, refering to Mart’s growing reputation as a racist and\/or Islamophobe, because of remarks like these: \u201cWhat can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There\u2019s a definite urge \u2013 don\u2019t you have it? \u2013 to say, \u2018The Muslim community […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,84],"tags":[48,2454,150,151],"class_list":["post-202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-islamophobia","tag-ian-mcewan","tag-islamophobia","tag-martin-amis","tag-racism-or-just-dickery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions\/204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}