Wake up to reality! say Amis and Anthony
Diary item, high priority: Tomorrow evening at 6.45 pm in the Institute of Contemporary Arts on The Mall in London, Martin Amis and Andrew Anthony will discuss "On writing and radical Islam". It should be an enlightening meeting of minds as both have taken a firm stance against terrorism and both despise the apologists for murderous jihadism who now occupy powerful positions in institutions such as the BBC, The Guardian, Channel 4 and The London Review of Books.
As promised yesterday, our focus in this post is Andrew Anthony, the journalist and author of The Fall-out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost his Innocence. Here's his take on the illiberal new world order:
"A more pervasive theme share by the old Left, and the new multicultualist Left, and seen in local government, academia, and some areas of the media is the old loathing of Western society and humanist values that blinded a previous generation to the horrors of Communism. The anti-Westernism no longer takes the rigid form of pro-Communism but instead the more protean shape of cultural relativism."
Anthony reserves particular loathing for the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who has pandered to grotesque Islamist bigots and petty South American thugs. He does a marvelous job of exposing the cheap leftism that now pervades British culture and which is funded by taxpayer's money doled out lavishly by Gordon Brown. This will not change until both Livingstone and Brown have been voted out of office, but the good news is that this prospect, so improbable just a week ago, now looks feasible.
"Wake up to reality — and sense" says Andrew Anthony. You have nothing to lose but "the liberal-left shibboleths (that America was evil, that multiculturalism created social cohesion, that crime was a simple function of poverty, and so on — you know the drill)." By the way, it was inspired thinking on the part of the ICA to invite both Anthony and Amis to share a podium because Martin Amis, who has been resolute in documenting Stalin's horrors, knows that there are many parallels between Soviet totalitarianism and today's Islamist variety. We need to keep that in mind.
