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Zippy, I fear you have bungled.
I'm sure you're usually pretty hot stuff at detecting a hidden, prejudiced agenda in a given text, but in this case you're mistaken.
Look at the first passage of text you've quoted. Look at the names I cite. Alice Walker - literary novelist. Primi Levi - literary novelist. Coleen McLoughlin - wife of football's Wayne Rooney, known mostly for, um, shopping. Her magnum opus 'Welcome to my World' is, if you've not read it, essentially a guide to being Coleen McLoughlin, and was in all likelihood not written without considerable *cough*help*cough* from a ghost writer, and - unlike 'The Colour Purple' and 'The Periodic Table' - was written for attention and money. Also, you might want to consider whether I was being entirely serious when I wrote the words a gift, if you will, to give to our species. Even disregarding the above, the first passage you quote was about 'House of Meetings' - not Amis' deplorable attitudes to Islam and Muslims - in which the truth Amis wishes to impart is that the Gulag was a really shitty place. Surely you're not calling him on that?
Regarding the second passage you quote, you seem to have rather convenienty ignored the many, many caveats I added when I wrote that Amis' horror at the problematic construct 'Islamism' was not without foundation. Think a little harder, and try to work out whether I'm saying that 'Islam' (a category so broad as to almost meaningless) should evoke horror, or that the actions of a very small number of people apparently acting according to a very particular and not at all widespread interpretation of a polyphonic faith should evoke horror? For fuck's sake, Zippy, are you really saying it's not OK for me (or indeed anyone) to be horrified by the attacks in New York, London, Bali, or Madrid? If it makes my horror easier to swallow, I promise that I feel equally, if not more, horrified by US actions in Iraq, Belgium's actions in the Congo during the 19th Century, or the bloody War of Jenkins' Nose. |
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