The Independent newspaper in Britain with a reader-based question-and-answer session with novelist Martin Amis. (thanks, Kevin!)
Are you an Islamophobe? ALISDAIR GRAY, Edinburgh
No. What I am is an Islamismophobe. Or better say an anti-Islamist because a phobia is an irrational fear, and there is nothing irrational about fearing someone who professedly wants to kill you. The form that Islamophobia is now taking - the harassment and worse of Muslim women in the street - disgusts me. It is mortifying to be part of a society in which any minority feels under threat. On the other hand, no society on earth, no society imaginable, could frictionlessly absorb a day like 7 July.
More generally, the difficulty has to do with the nature of national identity; and the American model is the one that we (and everyone else) should attempt to plagiarise. A Pakistani immigrant, in Boston, can say "I am an American", and all he is doing is stating the obvious. Can his equivalent, in Bradford, say the equivalent thing in the equivalent way? Britain needs to become what America has always been - an immigrant society. That, in any case, is our future.
The phrase "horrorism", which you invented to describe 9/11, is unintentionally hilarious. Have you got any more? JONATHAN BROOKS, by email
Yes, I have. Here's a good one (though I can hardly claim it as my own): the phrase is "fuck off".
I wasn't describing "9/11", as you call it. I was describing suicide bombing or suicide-mass murder. And the distinction between terrorism and horrorism is a real one. If for some reason you were about to cross Siberia by sleigh, you would be feeling "anxiety"; when you heard the first howl of the wolves, your anxiety would be promoted to "fear"; as the pack drew near and gave chase, your fear would become "terror"; "horror" is reserved for when the wolves are actually there. Some acts of terrorism are merely terrible. Suicide-mass murder, the act of self-bespattering, in which your assailant's blood and bones and organs become part of the argument, is always horrible. ...
Can the war on terror be won? AMBER ALWAN, by email
When historians come to write about this era, I persistently imagine, they will begin by saying that, at first, the West panicked and wildly overreacted, and that the strategy for prevailing was slow to crystallise. Remember the axiom: the danger of terrorism lies not in what it inflicts but in what it provokes. September 11 could be contained and survived; the ramifications of the Iraq war are still unknowable, and are already vast and multiform. Islamism has received a great boost from its rejection of reason and its embrace of death, both of which are hugely energising, as Lenin and Hitler well understood. But Islamism is simply too poisonous to survive for very long. What happened within Islam was not a civil war (between the moderates and the radicals); it was more like a revolution - a revolution which is already starting to devour its children. We won't "win", exactly. But there will come an end to the Age of Vanished Normalcy.
Why are you such a snob? BEATRICE FRANKS, by email
A snob is "a person who has an exaggerated respect for high social position or wealth and who looks down on those regarded as socially inferior". I have described the institution of the monarchy as "a wank" - a phrase, free, I think, of exaggerated respect. As for the so-called socially inferior, I have devoted many hundreds of pages to them, in fiction, and only the lousiest novelist can write with a sneer.
On the other hand, I think snobbery ought to make a comeback. Not the old "class" shit but mental and verbal snobbery. Sometimes snobbery is forced upon you. So let's have a period of exaggerated respect for rationality; and let's look down on people who use the words everybody else uses. Funnily enough, Princess Diana was also the princess of second-hand speech, of mouldering novelties, of what might be called herd-words. Seen it, done it, got the T-shirt. Had a banana - I don't think so.