So How Come There’s No Fatwah?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has to live in a cell to stay alive but evidently Martin Amis can say what he wants with impunity.

From the Daily Mail:

The author Martin Amis has claimed he feels ‘morally superior’ to Muslim states which are not as ‘evolved’ as the Western world.

Responding to long-running accusations that he is Islamophobic, Amis launched a fresh invective against the Muslim faith and many of its followers.

He admitted his late father and grandfather had been racist but then claimed radical Muslims were the real racists, misogynists and homophobes.

The 58-year-old defended a proposal he made last year that Muslims be deported and strip-searched in a crackdown on terrorism.

His latest comments came in a TV news interview last night and during the Cheltenham Literature Festival last week.

The Muslim Council of Britain branded them racist and ‘shameful’.

In an interview with Jon Snow on Channel Four News, Amis declared: ‘I feel morally superior to Islamists, by some distance. I feel an intellectual distance to Islam.

‘There are great problems with Islam. The Koran recommends the beating of women.

‘The anti-Semites, the psychotic misogynists and the homophobes are the Islamists.’

Days earlier, Amis shocked festivalgoer’s in Cheltenham with claims that Muslim states are less ‘civilised’ than Western society.

‘Some societies are just more evolved than others,’ he said. ‘I am not saying these people are genetically incapable of not being terrorists.

‘These societies are arming themselves with weapons like the AK47 and blowing people up on buses and Tubes.’

When one member of his audience suggested not all Muslims were terrorists he retorted: ‘No one else is doing it.’

So why isn’t he dead? I see no sign that British Muslims are particularly pacifist. What am I missing in this translation?

But he’s not done digging this hole yet…
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Amis goes on:

‘I blame Islamists, the ideology within a religion,’ he said.

‘All the perpetrators, with a few exceptions, are young men from Pakistan.

‘Islamism will be a sink for every Walter Mitty of murder, every functioning schizophrenic, every rampant anti-Semite.

‘There is a rage which has been building for the past century which is hoping to rebuild its (Islam’s) superiority through violence.’

Well, that’s pretty clear. He’s picking and choosing whom to denigrate. But the imams and spokespeople for British Muslims are, as usual, deaf to the nuances. Here’s one huff-and-puff:

…a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain said: ‘Amis clearly seems to believe many Muslim communities are primitive.

But just because some extremists have committed terrorist acts does not give him licence to denigrate an entire faith community.

‘He should be ashamed of himself.’

I thought Amis made it clear he was talking about “the ideology within the religion,” not the faith itself. But maybe the Muslim Council of Britain has some Pavlovian conditioning to particular words and this renders them immune to the finer details.

I guess we’ll just have to watch them line up to sue ol’ Martin for defamation. Should be interesting. Surely there’s a phalanx of British CAIR-type lawyers working on their briefs even now.

[Resist the temptation to snigger about the last noun in the previous sentence. And no remarks about ‘snigger’ either]