"I think Martin has suffered terribly at the hands of the Guardian"

Thus speaks Mac, defending Mart. These interviews are heavily edited and condensed so it can't directly be blamed on McEwan, but the summary given there of l'affaire Amis is very, very misleading.

He is not fucking kidding on the other hand; here's Mart himself and he is pissed off. Apparently he didn't get the memo that if you shoot your gob off unthinkingly all the time, it tends to do a bit of damage to your reptuation as A Serious.

Is Martin Amis a racist? To be honest, I think that the evidence is better for him being an Arabophobe than an Islamophobe, but part of the problem is that he isn't really attuned to the difference, because he hasn't actually thought about this as much as he thinks he has. Just as with his totally unthinking Trotskyism, which then morphed into a totally unthinking anti-Communism, he's now read the Paul Berman book and believes that repeating it verbatim will render him a deep thinker. That's quite a nasty thing to say about a writer, and I only make the charge because it's clearly what happened when he read a volume of Robert Conquest, then regurgitated it as Koba the Dread. What happens with Amis, I think, is that he literally doesn't understand the difference between the analytic and literary thought processes; spends a whole day believing himself to be thinking about Communism, but he's actually just coming up with metaphors like "Comrade Horse-Yoghurt".

Martin apparently meets professional ex-jihadi Ed Husain tomorrow, and will perhaps be able to keep a civil tongue in his mouth. As a British-born Muslim of Pakistani descent, Ed doesn't look particularly like he comes from the Middle East so this may be possible - being polite to him was apparently more than Ayaan Hirsi Ali could manage but there you go. Keep this one in mind the next time that some Decent tries to convince you that AHA and Ed Husain (and Hassan Butt, of whom we seem to hear a lot less these days, perhaps because he is transparently a Walter Mitty character and loon) are two of a piece in the broader ex-Muslim movement.

Meanwhile, with the following sentence:

It's not simply that Saudi Arabia and Iran prove that the more Islamist a regime the more corrupt its officials but that McKee and his colleagues talked as if the 20th century had not happened

Nick Cohen proves conclusively that he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. Saudi Arabia an Islamist state?