Tuesday, September 26, 2006

I can't resist

It is of no importance to anything but I never let such things stop me...

For some reason I can't be bothered to research, John Derbyshire of National Review and NRO goes off on Martin Amis for Islamophobia:

Brit Lit Twit Goes Islamophobe
The late Sir Kingsley Amis was an excellent writer who held sensible opinions about most things. I have always regarded his son Martin Amis as a frivolous lefty twit, a prime example of the statistical phenomenon known as "regression to the mean."
Think what you will of Mr. Derbyshire but if Martin Amis is, in fact, a frivolous lefty twit then it deserves noting. The quote Derbyshire provides
"...the only thing the Islamists like about modernity is modern weapons. And they're going to get better and better at that. They're also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they'll be a third. ... What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suff­­er­­­ing? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan… 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 – well, they've got to stop their children killing people. It's a huge dereliction on their part."
may perhaps qualify as "Islamophobic" but is shared by a fair number of people who are quite fed up with the machinations of the death cult. It isn't, after all, like being phobic about something utterly harmless such as palindromes (Aibohphobia). The mussies do, after all, seem to have an unfortunate penchant for murder and mayhem.

I know nothing of Martin Amis and precious little of Sir Kingsley Amis other than that he authored what is, by far, the most humorous book I have ever read - Lucky Jim. I did not write any of the review commentary on Amazon but I can attest to the suggestion that reading the book while in public might be ill-advised

because, most likely, it will provoke loud screams of laughter and you'll embarrass yourself.

I read it on an eight-hour flight once upon a time. Fortunately when one laughs that well for that long one becomes completely unconcerned with embarassment.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

melissa:

My wife the P.G. Woodhouse and other British author aficionada has been trying to get me to read Lucky Jim for the past 18 years. So I suppose I should.

truepeers said...

Is Derbyshire playing PC games with Amis? If so, I can't understand it since D's ideas on race are surely open to much more in the way of PC attacks and one doesn't want to see a guy beating a fellow just because he has himself been beaten with the same stick and wants to tell everyone "really I'm not the heretic - he is". That being said, I think Amis is on firmer ground with Islam, than Derbyshire is with race. Anyway, the link is to the New English Review which has a lot of good reads, whatever you think of Derbyshire.

Syl said...

Funny, but I had a different takeaway. The point being that even lefties are beginning to understand what's going on.

Of course I could have been influenced by the piece I had read just before dropping into the Corner--about a couple of establishment Euros in Denmark whose book on the Islam threat to Europe-and pretty harsh--was just released.