The novelist Martin Amis has fired another shot at Islam by condemning the “abject failure” of Muslims to denounce suicide bombings.
He said it was normal and natural to feel “retaliatory urges” after allegations in August last year of a plot to bomb transatlantic passenger jets which could have killed 3,000 people.
Amis, who has just become professor of creative writing at Manchester University, has been embroiled in a row with one of his new colleagues, the Marxist academic Terry Eagleton, and made his fresh remarks at a packed debate at the university this week which both men had been due to address. However, Prof Eagleton, who teaches cultural theory at Manchester, cancelled his appearance, reportedly because of a clash in his diary.
In reference to suicide bombings, Amis told the audience: “There should be from every corner of the West a permanent factory siren of disgust for these actions.” He also criticised “distorted sympathy” shown to Palestine.
Earlier in the year, Prof Eagleton said that Amis had abandoned sensible Western liberal values and taken up views akin to those of “a British National Party thug”.
A hospital in northern England is playing down media reports saying that nurses have been ordered to stop normal duties five times a day to turn Muslim patients’ beds so that they face Mecca.
Lu Gronseth listens regularly to WWTC, a conservative talk-radio station in Minneapolis, and even advertises his mortgage-loan business on the station. But when he learned that a nationally syndicated radio show host had told WWTC listeners that Muslims should be deported and made rude comments about what they could do with their religion, Mr Gronseth pulled his ads from the station.
“Doubtless the safe return of Ms Gibbons from a sinister and genocidal rogue regime, which from 1992-1996 hosted Osama bin Laden, will be spun as a great triumph for multicultural diplomacy…. The true moral of the affair is that we are dealing with a concerted onslaught on our values by people whose barbarism is evident to anyone with eyes to see it but which has effectively been ruled out of polite usage by government and the security services who witter on abstractly about ‘ideas’ and ‘ideology’ as if they have no apparent connection with one religion.
A Muslim group is refusing to return to its meeting place because members fear arsonists who