Martin Amis can't get enough of Nick Cohen's new book, apparently. Now there's a surprise. Amis's output tends to reproduce the usual “Islamo-fascism” spiel of the Euston crowd - behind which it seems (partly if not wholly) lies thinly-veiled Islamophobic prejudice. “When I come back to Britain,” says Amis, “I see a pretty good multicultural society. The only element that is not fitting in is Islam.” The only element? Presumably the BNP were on holiday at the time. Most of the tabloid press too, no doubt.

And “Islam” as a whole is not fitting in? Perhaps we can imagine the reaction if Amis had made the same remarks about Judaism “not fitting in”, maybe throwing in some mention of Jewish “gloomy bastards” and the “death cult” of British nationals going abroad to fight with the Israeli armed forces in the occupied Palestinian territories - think he would he get away with it?

But Amis's writing is not only founded on ugly prejudice: it is combined with a complete incapacity to understand rational thought. In a Q&A with readers of the Independent, he produces this rather extraordinary rendition:

“… when I went on Question Time the other week, a woman in the audience, her voice quavering with self-righteousness, presented the following argument: since it was America that supported Osama bin Laden when he was fighting the Russians, the US armed forces, in response to September 11, “should be dropping bombs on themselves!” And the audience applauded. It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.” (My italics.)

http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article2154795.ece

Because the “woman in the audience” followed the logic behind US aggression to its logical conclusion, exposing its manifest absurdity, she became an “apologist”.

It is hard to know where to begin with this level of idiocy. As Chomsky once phrased it, in a reply to a different (or not-so-different) commentator, the only reasonable conclusion is that Amis suffers from “brain damage so severe as to be unable to comprehend an elementary reductio” (my link).

(The same Oliver Kamm, incidentally (for it is he), describes a similar piece of almost unbelievable stupdity by Jeffrey Isaacs as “the best thing that has ever been written on Chomsky's political writings”. I urge readers to read it in full, along with Chomsky's replies - not on the grounds of its own merit, since it is clearly the most idiotic piece of writing you are ever likely to encounter in your lifetime or mine, but because of what it says about Kamm.)

In conclusion, Cohen should welcome Amis’s adulations. Having barely a brain cell between them, they are clearly made for each other.