Comments

1. Noga

   Wednesday 21 November 2007 at 12:29

   It is a great friendship, between these two authors, a modern day version of Montaigne’s model of friendship with La Boetie, once described by Amis like this: “My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.”

2. Mustafa

   Wednesday 21 November 2007 at 17:00

   I’m astonished the Grauniad didn’t put a comments box on the bottom of the Hitch’s article as a vindictive measure. It was a rare surprise to read an opinion piece in the paper without a voluminous body of shite opening beneath it.

   Kudos to the Hitch for responding to a piece of doggerel that would have put Seamus Milne to shame.

3. Will

   Friday 23 November 2007 at 18:17

   See also following letter from Ian Mcewan

   http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,2214328,00.html

   A religion is above all else a thought system. Since Islam, like Christianity, has many adherents and makes highly specific, extravagant and supernatural claims about the world, it should expect, in an open society, to be challenged. 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.

   Much of what passes for moral guidance in the Bible, especially, but not only, in the Old Testament, appears to me to be morally repugnant. I like to feel free to say so. Similarly, there are firmly held beliefs in “mainstream” Islam that are questionable. One instance is apostasy. The orthodox view appears to be that men and women who turn away from their religion are guilty of a serious thought crime. Recommended punishments range from ostracism to death. There are numerous websites now on which courageous ex-Muslims across the Middle East, Pakistan and Bangladesh correspond with each other in secret. The dominant emotion is fear of being discovered. Such a dispensation appears to me to be an offence to rational inquiry and free thinking. To say so, Mr Bennett, is not to be a racist, but to exercise the gift of consciousness and the privilege of liberty.

   I’ve known Martin Amis for almost 35 years, and he’s no racist. 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. I wonder whether Ronan Bennett would care to expend so much of his rhetorical might excoriating at similar length the thugs who murdered - in the name of their religion - their fellow citizens in London in 2005.
   Ian McEwan
   London

4. resistor

   Saturday 24 November 2007 at 2:11

   [silly antisemite leaves electronic graffiti — worthless shit]

5. John in Cincinnati

   Sunday 25 November 2007 at 15:40

   Good to see the Amis - easy to miss things like that which are posted in the comments.

6. Gadgie

   Sunday 25 November 2007 at 21:06

   Now Chris Morris has joined in with a disgusting piece of shit in the Observer saying that Amis is the equivalent of Abu Hamza.
   The absurd world of Martin Amis

   I was thinking of posting on it, but it is so bad as to be not worth the effort. Pleasingly, most of the CiF commenters have shredded it.