Page 2 of 2 BOOK REVIEW Rebranding 9/11 The Second Plane by Martin Amis
Reviewed by Julian Delasantellis
do more or less as they please. 'Islam,' he frequently reminds us, 'isn't like
that'. Islam follows you everywhere, into the kitchen, into the bedroom, into
the bathroom, and beyond death into eternity. Islam "submission" - the
surrender of independence of mind. That surrender now bears the weight of well
over fifty generations, and fourteen centuries."
Of course, if there is a denial of the joy of life, it must follow that there
exists the embrace and longing for the sweetness of death
exemplified by the September 11 hijackers.
"For the Islamists, death is a beginning. What is worldly life, after all,
but," here Amis quotes Ayatollah Khomeini, "the scum of existence?"
How did Islam start down this tragic path? Amis' answer is pretty familiar to
anyone who has read neo-conservative favorite Bernard Lewis.
"Following the defeat of 1948 [the first Arab-Israeli war], and following the
defeat (in six days) of 1967, Islam, or its militant vanguard, was finding that
it had arrived at a crossroads-or a T junction. The way to the left was marked
'Less Religion,' and meant a journey to the future. The way to the right was
marked 'More Religion (Islam is the Solution),' and meant a journey to the
past. Which direction would lead to the return of God's favor? On their left, a
stretch of oily macadam, perhaps resembling one of the unlovelier sections of
the London orbital, scattered with windblown trash, and, of course, choked and
throttled with traffic. On their right, something like a garden path at the
Alhambra, cleaner, simpler, and-thanks to the holy warriors and their 'smiting
of necks' much, much emptier."
According to Amis what sin is committed by those who try to establish some sort
of counterstory, some manner of dialogue and conversation between Islam and the
West? They become "the appeaser of an armed doctrine with the following tenets;
it is racist misogynistic, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitional imperialist,
and genocidal."
Winston Churchill once said "jaw jaw over war war," but Amis appears to feel
just the opposite. He throws in a few obviously half hearted and obligatory
criticisms of the Iraq War - what writer could not resist throwing a few barbs
at that unique set of middle American malapropisms now known as Rumsfeldisms -
but his main problem with the endeavor seems to be that it was a mistake even
to try to impose democracy on a Moslem nation, even a secular one like Iraq.
There are about six reviews of other recently published works on the subject of
the Islamic threat; most of these fail to rise much above the discourse one
might hear on an American right wing radio talk show, with hosts ranting about
"Islamofscism." Two pieces are vignettes of Amis at the centers of power, one,
on a visit to the White House - where Karl Rove gave him a chocolate, what a
nice guy! - and one on the campaign with Tony Blair in 2005, where he
essentially gets Blair to admit that Britain's participation in the Iraq War
was nothing much more than an attempt to create a US-UK alliance to act as a
counterweight to the Franco-German/Chirac-Schroeder axis then dominating
continental Europe. The point of both these pieces seem to be simply "look at
me; I'm Martin Amis at the center of power!"
There are two short stories in the book. One is an internal monologue about
9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta's last morning on earth. Amis postulates that
Atta was massively constipated during the final months of planning for the
operation, a condition that only righted itself, to Atta's joy, in the seconds
before his plane hit the World Trade Center- surely Amis can do symbolism
better than that.
The other short story In the Palace of the End, is pure Amis skill and
finesse. It is a 2004 first person account of a day in the life of a body
double of one of the sons of Saddam Hussein, employed at one of the former
Ba'ath regime's torture centers. By day he participates in the gruesome
breaking and killing of the bodies of the regime's opponents; by night, he
performs marathon oral sex sessions on innocent young women, apparently to
assure that the word of the Hussein family's continued virility and skill in
pleasing women spreads far and wide through the nation. It was here, in the
juxtaposition of pain and ecstasy, of torture and orgasm, of the horrifying
terror of the victims and the suffocating boredom of the torturers, can be
found classic Amis fiction, like an electrically charged knife cutting through
butter, this was worth plowing through all the blather of his polemics.
By now, it is very hard to distinguish what was once known as the "war on
terror' with the war in Iraq, although when the war started, Iraq was just
about the; least fundamentalist Moslem, the least, as Amis puts it, "Islamist"
country in the Islamic world.
At the time the war was being pitched to the American and British publics, you
saw a strange phenomenon, the rise of the left wing Iraq War supporter. In
Britain this was centered around Tony Blair's "Third Way" Labour Party
centrists, but in America, where the Bush Administration quickly realized that
9/11 could be utilized to totally drive the left's influence from power and
decision-making, the caucus of left wing war supporters - outside of the
Democratic Party legislators such as Senator Hillary Clinton and current Vice
Presidential nominee Joe Biden, who only supported the war out of craven
political opportunism, so as they wouldn't be labeled "soft on terrorism" by
Fox News - basically consisted of two people, former Clinton era National
Security Council official Kenneth Pollack, author of 2002's "The Threatening
Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq", and New York University Professor Paul
Berman, author of 2003's "Terror and Liberalism."
Pollack and Berman make arguments somewhat along the lines of Amis, that Iraq
and the Islamic world were so trapped in ignorance and backwardness as to
represent a threat to the liberal; values Western intellectuals cherish -
tolerance, pluralism, the liberation of women, diversity and respect.
If only it was people like this, brave hearted secularists and intellectuals
committed to free inquiry and reason, to toleration of all faiths and creeds,
which America sent to Iraq. It wasn't. The army the US sent to Iraq was
composed overwhelmingly of poor white boys and girls from rural America, places
where the local Protestant, frequently Baptist, church was overwhelmingly the
major cultural influence.
It was in the pews of these houses of worship where the future soldiers and
their families heard that Islam was evil and under the control of Satan, that
the Koran advocates and celebrates the slaughter of non-believers, that the
Prophet Mohammad was a bloodthirsty pederast, indeed, that the entire conflict
in the Mid-east is nothing but the first stages of the "Left Behind"
tribulations that will precede the second coming. Maybe in London, or in New
York, where Amis now spends much of his time, the conflict between Islam and
the West, between America and its foes in Iraq, looks like a titanic, Manichean
corrival between reason and madness, between freedom and darkness. As one who
recently lived in Red State, flyover America, to me it looks a lot more like
the mild madness of places where you get a "God bless you" along with your
change at the gas station convenience store versus the virulent madness of the
jihadis strapping explosives wrapped in nails to their children's bodies.
As for the Amis values of respect for religious and cultural diversity,
pluralism, tolerance, and respect for reason and rationality, all you have to
do is cast your mind back to the madness of 2005's Terry Schiavo case in the US
to realize that both sides could use a whole lot more of these than they
currently think necessary.
In the words of former US Air Force officer and Reagan-era Pentagon official
Mickey Weinstein, the founder of the Religious Freedom Foundation, "We are
facing a national security threat in this country that is every bit as
significant in magnitude, width and breadth internally as that presented
externally by the now-resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda. And it is the destruction
of the US constitutionally mandated wall separating church and state, in the
technologically most lethal organization every created by humankind, which is
our honorable and noble military. I'm here to report to you today that that
wall is nothing but smoke and debris. We are facing an absolute fundamentalist
Christianization - a Talibanization - of the US Marine Corps, army, navy and
air force."
In his review in The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier charged that Amis seems to
consider himself a soldier in the "war on terror", as if his pointed, acerbic
diatribes were bayonets, his sentences heavy with gravitas and warning
veritable artillery barrages. Amis should know better than that. If, as World
War I French prime minister Georges Clemenceau once said "war is too important
to be left to the generals", it certainly must follow then that it's way too
important to be left to the intellectuals and novelists.
The Second Plane: September 11. Terror and Boredom by Martin Amis.
Publisher Alfred A Knopf. ISBN: 978-0-307-26928-7 (0-307-26928-0). Price US$25,
212 pages.
Julian Delasantellis is a management consultant, private investor and
educator in international business in the US state of Washington. He can be
reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.
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