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The writer Martin Amis has recently become embroiled in a minor tangle over some ideas he posited about Muslim fundamentalism. He stated the following during an interview for The Times in 2006:

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.

Not a great deal happened after that. Then recently Terry Eagleton, professor of cultural theory at the University of Manchester, fired a volley of accusations towards the writer Kingsley Amis, Martin’s late father. These charges consisted of the usual roster of isms and phobias that are hurled during such invectives. None of this really mattered on its own, because Kingsley Amis is dead and it’s all been more or less said before. However, Eagleton went on to include Martin Amis in his vituperation, insinuating that the writer is as guilty of certain isms as his father. He added on the Guardian Unlimited website that:

There is something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment.

Eagleton is a Marxist and a former Catholic who sometimes writes nice things about his abandoned faith. Is he seriously suggesting that Muslim Extremism is anything but hostile towards either Catholicism or the ideology of Karl Marx, and that it reserves its true deadly vigour for the likes of Amis and his “political allies”, whoever they are? He knows - and if he doesn’t he’s stupid - that Islamic Extremism is hostile towards almost everything: non-believers, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Homosexuals, Capitalism, Communism, emancipated women, progress, education, democracy, sex and those who don’t follow the correct interpretation of Islam are all things that enrage the extremist, less we need to be reminded.

But the thing is, some of us clearly do need to be reminded. Eagleton, if I read him correctly, is assuming Amis is a racist and a fan of Western war-making and empire because he said what he thinks about an ideology that is somewhat more violent and unforgiving than Nazism, if far less organised. What can we understand about Eagleton’s own solution to this phenomenon? Well, for starters he seems to have some degree of sympathy with it, so perhaps appeasement would be his best idea. But where would he be prepared to draw the line?

Britain, or the UK, or England, or whatever we call it has a dark past. The peoples of this little country have at times pillaged and looted and enslaved and murdered across the globe. We share this grim shame with almost all other countries, tribes and certainly empires. However, despite this unforgivable unpleasantness we have somehow managed to forge a society that I feel immensely proud of and grateful for. We know what the cretins of old thought of and did to women. In today’s UK, women are still, in my opinion, far from equal with men but they are a trillion times better off than they were only 80 years ago, and one day, if this trend continues, I am confident that they will attain complete equality. Homosexuals have seen a similar transformation in their lives, as the permafrost of ignorance, stupidity, bigotry and religion has melted in the unavoidable glare of common sense.

Do these two things not demonstrate how far we have advanced? (Unless, of course, you see the emancipation of women and homosexuals as bad or useless things, in which case you probably can’t be helped.)

Now, when the Islamofascists throw acid in the faces of impudent unveiled women; when they murder a Dutch film-maker for daring to create a film that highlighted the mistreatment of Muslim women in Europe; when they threaten to kill Ayaan Hirsi Ali for bravely speaking out about the vile treatment meted out to women in Islamic countries; when the unspeakably wicked practice of enforced arranged marriage is carried out on British soil, is Eagleton of the opinion that criticism of these activities is effectively racism? Who can tell?

Amis got himself into more “trouble” by claming that he feels “morally superior” to Muslim states. This, no doubt, will have made Eagleton’s stomach churn too. It certainly upset the Muslim Council of Britain, who condemned the comments as racist and shameful. Racist? Feeling morally superior to someone else’s idea of the world is racist?

Islam, like Christianity and Buddhism and Judaism and all the rest, is just an idea. So, for instance, when confronted with an idea that emphatically adjudges that women can be no more than the possessions of men, and that homosexuality is a sin punishable by death because it goes against the decree of some imaginary cosmic order, I myself also feel morally superior. I also feel morally superior to Nazis, nihilists, Stalinists and lots of other people who live for their violence and who can’t accept that all human beings are equal.

Here in the UK we have a far from perfect society. There are cracks all over. The divide between rich and poor is shameful; our public services need work in almost all departments; there is too much hedonism and violence. But we are also, on the whole, a permissive and tolerant and progressive society. I think some countries have better societies than ours (much of Scandinavia, for example) but that we are literally decades ahead of many, many places (try organizing a gay pride march or being an investigative reporter in Russia and see how far it gets you).

Much of what our society can be proud of has come about as a consequence of the slow eradication of clerical control. Now it seems that elements within Islam seek to drag us back into those pointless, bleak days of religious monotony, intolerance and cruelty.

Thankfully, white supremacist terrorist atrocities have been surprisingly infrequent in this country. The hideous nail-bombing campaign that afflicted London in the 90s is the only such event that sticks out in my mind. But consider this: if a large and organised neo-nazi terrorist cell suddenly launched a wave of murderous bomb attacks on a number of mosques, synagogues, gay bars and whatever other premises the idiots decided were ripe for immolation, I know what my reaction, and I would guess Martin Amis’ too, would be: that the persons responsible should be hunted down, destroyed and stamped out utterly. If the cell was large enough, or if there were several of them, I would also call for extreme police measures; for instance stopping and searching white men who looked like they might be a little too pleased about being white (we know the type by now, don’t we?) Indeed, as a pasty man myself I wouldn’t object to being stopped and searched if it meant that in a small way it was helping to prevent the obliteration of some precious soul who just happened to be a Muslim or a Jew.

What would Eagleton’s reaction be to that reaction? Wouldn’t he be obliged to call it ‘racist’, what with the perpetrators probably belonging to what might be loosely termed ‘a race’, their murderous actions merely an understandable manifestation of their own insane ideology? He wouldn’t dream of saying such a thing, which begs the question: why is the same thing somehow different when it comes from the Islamofascists?

I would guess that he and his ilk hear the voice of the oppressed in the plangent roar of the fundamentalist’s bomb. But do the white supremacists not also think themselves the oppressed ones in their ‘own lands’, their banal and pathetic and febrile feelings and views crushed by liberals and gays and Jews and what have you? Yes, they do, the poor dears.

But Eagleton isn’t really concerned with any of these things. Like the woman who makes a false rape-allegation and does an injustice to the man who is falsely convicted but who really commits a far greater and more fatal injustice against the thousands of women who are genuinely raped, Eagleton is just using words like ‘racism’, ‘homophobia’ and ‘misogyny’ as stones to throw around – I have no real belief that he cares about these things in themselves. His consternation is caused by Kingsley Amis’ audacity in turning his back on communism, and no other things. It could be quite easily deduced that Kingsley was in fact all of the things Eagleton accuses him of (Martin Amis himself acknowledges that his father was a racist), but, and of this I am 99.9% certain, if Kingsley had remained a loyal communist/Marxist/fellow-traveller to his dying day, Eagleton couldn’t have cared if he had boiled Jews and women to death in his cellar.

That, I think, is the root of Eagleton’s pyrexia. But what of others who equate critcism of illiberal and malign religious activities with racism?

Our government can’t bring itself to create legislation that truly tackles the wretched practice of enforced arranged marriage. We know it goes on. We know of the cases where extremely unfortunate young women have been maimed and murdered because they have refused to marry someone they have never met, or have committed the even worse sin of marrying outside of their faith. If that isn’t misogyny then nothing is. These terrible things are occurring on British soil today.

The apparently liberal critics of the critics of these grotesque practices are effectively telling us that what Muslims get up to in their own back yard is their own business; that the daughter of a Muslim family is the exclusive property of that family and that that’s the end of it. That actually is a form of racism. They pretend that culture is inextricably tied up with race and that criticism of a belief-system’s more malevolent tendencies is xenophobia (that’s assuming that there is even such a thing as ‘race’). Nothing could be more stupid or dangerous.

The plodding old mantra, ‘if you don’t like it, then why don’t go back where you came from’ is a tired and silly thing. It seems we are very proud of our freedom of speech until someone says something we vehemently disagree with. As it happens, I am happy for Muslims to call for sharia law and to call this country a travesty. I’m glad the BNP are able to vocalize their daft thoughts. Allowing these things to go on proves that freedom of speech is an actual reality. I also think that it’s vitally important that we know what people really think.

I would say this to the Muslim community: ‘you are more than welcome here. We want you to be happy and prosperous and secure, and we’ll do everything we can to protect you from the forces of darkness and stupidity that reside in these lands. We are all equal here; you are no exception. However, if you’re going to mistreat women, and intimidate those who make films and write books and draw cartoons that you don’t like, and fail to denounce and root-out those elements in your community who indiscriminately murder, well, we’re not going to let you get away with it.’