It is more pitiful than that:
Martin Amis/Observer UK 10.09.06When the tempter is a temptress, and really wants you to sin, she needs to be both available and willing. And it is almost inconceivable that poor Sayyid, the frail, humourless civil servant, and turgid anti-semite (salting his talk with quotes from that long-exploded fabrication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), ever encountered anything that resembled an offer.
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Any mention of the PotEoZ has to be followed immediately by the fact of its being a hoax made plain and clear. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a hoax, a forgery, a fabrication.
Therefore any discussion of Jewish intrigue and control in the arcane world of international finance, or Jewish ownership and self-interested control of the media in America and Britain, and Australia - or long-range Jewish planning for dominance and control of anything anywhere - is anti-Semitic nonsense and must be dismissed without argument as bigotry and a kind of gentile pathology with obscure and ancient roots and no basis in reality whatsoever.
Also Amis need never mention that he is himself a Jew, because this would never in any way influence his views on "terrorism" and "faith" and especially faith "recently and almost endearingly defined as 'the desire for the approval of supernatural beings'".
Amis says:
And again it's not necessary to disclose the fact that this is a Jew speaking to this most volatile of subjects, because he speaks not as a Jew, toward Jewish interests, but as a Western Man, to his fellow Western Men, about "Islamists".We should understand that the Islamists' hatred of America is as much abstract as historical, and irrationally abstract, too; none of the usual things can be expected to appease it. The hatred contains much historical emotion, but it is their history, and not ours, that haunts them.
"...it is their history, and not ours, that haunts them."
The word "Islamists" means something much different here than the word "Muslims". In an academic setting it means someone who studies Islam, a term like "botanist" or "physicist", in a less anxious social moment it could mean someone who advocates Islam, like Christian missionaries advocate Christianity; but Amis means it to convey something more like "communist" or "racist" or, even more basely, "terrorist". In his use it implies something pushy and arrogant, zealous, something with an agenda, something that wants to change us, use us, bring us submissively into relation with its dominance.
There is no equivalent term for Amis, who speaks here, not as a Jew but as the voice of Western Man. Islamist is now a term of withheld bigotry, a signifier that carries the disgust and virulence of a term like "Islamo-fascist" in reserve, for later, for private display.
Amis says:
Paris Hilton isn't the Whore of Babylon, but she is the currently most visible archetype of Western Woman, not as gender counterpart to Western Man, but as subsidiary - not as wife, but as temporary chattel - and Paris Hilton is the embodiment of seduction, she is nothing but the posture and glance of seduction personified, and she has been delivered to the world by...well, not by Martin Amis, surely.The West isn't being seductive, of course; all the West is being is attractive. But the Islamist's paranoia extends to a kind of thwarted narcissism.
But what has delivered her to us, whoever and whatever that is, is also running the campaign to ridicule and reduce the power of Islam.
To say that the West isn't being seductive is to speak from what must be either crippling self-delusion or intentional denial. The Western presence in the world - at least until the invasion of Iraq began to supplant its seductive imagery with real-time glimpses of the horror it carried - the Western image, whether in China or Patagonia or Nairobi or Mumbai, is an image created and maintained by commercial advertisement - chiefly by television, whose programs are merely a growth medium for the commercial messages attached to them. This is how the West has announced itself, through the agency of commercials for its things, its products - and its political leaders are elected through strategies identical to the marketing of things, are in fact marketed to their constituencies like products.
The logos for five generations of Americans now has been the mercenary writing on the wall that is commercial advertising - we're so deep into that most kids can't get to the idea of it not being an essential part of reality. Children are seduced by the marketers of things on television from before they're capable of coherent speech. Seduction is the business of the West.
Amis says:
That there is misogyny all through the Old Testament, and quite a bit of it in the New is inarguable. That the Judeo-Christian civilization of the last two thousand years was adamant enough in its denial of rights to women as to make it a virtual twin of the most repressive fundamentalist Muslim caliphate is also inarguable.All men are my brothers. I would have liked to have said it then, and I would like to say it now: all men are my brothers. But all men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother. At the very best, he is my half-brother - by definition. Osama is not my brother.
Pictures of women in the costumes of 19th c. America make them seem nearly equivalent to the hijab - complete covering, denial of any feminine display, nothing showing but a glimpse of eye and shoe. There were women who pushed the boundaries of taste and acceptability then too of course, and each step of the way the once-daring became the now-commonplace; but there were women in Iraq before the invasion who dressed just like their sisters in Boston and Philadelphia and New York, and women in Beirut and Gaza who did, as well.
Women were beaten, women starved themselves in hunger strikes and were publicly humiliated less than a hundred years ago, in America and England, for demanding the right to vote. Beaten by officers of the law and ridiculed by voices as smug, pompous, and self-congratulatory in their time as Amis is in his. Yet the current champions of justice and equality point only to Islam as the cause of women's disenfranchisement. It works well on an ahistorical people, that kind of trick, on people who don't remember their great-grandmothers' world. Because a recognition of how recently this supposedly more enlightened society was equally bigoted and intolerant and repressive might temper judgment, and leave us less quick to condemn.
Amis is speaking to that ahistorical audience, and he speaks as though, except for the villainous horde of angry Arabs out there waiting to oppress our sisters and cut our heads off, all is fine. But all is not fine.
The same rhetorical sleight of hand is being used, today - as the fifth anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001 is marked - and for the same purpose; and that same ahistorical audience is being told to continue to pretend that the Islamic world is a seething mass of vicious irrational hatreds, and that the men who hijacked those planes and took down those towers were motivated purely by a simplistic irrational hatred of "freedom" and by a puritanical disgust at our more natural and liberated morals, that they chose to see as the seductive evil of the West.
Osama bin Laden said clearly and plainly that the violent injustice done to the Palestinians was a primary cause of his hatred of Israel and the US:
As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:
(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.
a) You attacked us in Palestine
Their history is our history. If Osama bin Laden is not my brother, then Martin Amis is not my brother.
If the history of the Palestinians isn't ours, then the history of the Jews isn't ours.
The alternative is that we're all in this together.
That this accusation of bin Laden's might be addressed by the many decent people for whom September 11, 2001 was a traumatic mystery - an horrifically violent act that seemed to come from out of nowhere, without warning or explanation - is of course impossible, and it's impossible for very simple reasons.
An examination of the accusation, what bin Laden says is the cause of 9/11, would lead to the very clear and obvious conclusion that yes, the Palestinians have been treated with injustice - have been attacked, driven from their homes, killed, beaten, humiliated - and that the naturally occurring violent response to that injustice has been treated, dishonestly, as itself a primary cause of Israeli "retaliation", which has meant still further attacks.
The discovery that the very clear injustice done to the Palestinians has been hidden from the basically decent American people, who were in large part financing it, would inevitably follow from any honest public examination and discussion, any serious attempt to understand what's causing the anger that's causing the terrorism.
And that's impossible.
Not impossible that it exist - it exists, it's what's happening now in Palestine and what's been happening there for decades. And what's happening in Palestine was what caused the hatred that caused 9/11.
It's impossible that it ever be discussed publicly and dispassionately, because the places where that public and dispassionate discussion would take place are no longer there. They've fallen - they're a hole in the ground surrounded by promises and plans, an empty place where politicians can lay wreaths, and make speeches about honor and freedom and remembrance.
