An irritating chap in so many ways, Martin Amis. But the novelist raises an interesting point in a new polemic published today. Why, he asks provocatively, do so many westerners on the left - "liberal relativists" he calls them - find themselves on the same side of the line as Osama bin Laden when asked to choose between the al-Qaida leader and George Bush?
Or, as Marty puts it in the Times, on the side of appeasing "an armed doctrine that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitorial, imperialist and genocidal".
Amis says it goes way beyond the old habits of moral equivalence between the US and USSR when confronted with the cold war which ended when the Berlin Wall fell on November 9 1989 - the real 9/11, he mischievously suggests.
He believes that "we are impeded by naivety, decency and a kind of recurrent incredulity" when confronted with the enormity of the Islamist cult of death - he uses the posh word "thanatoid" from the Greek word for death - and thinks that we should all know better after what we have experienced of similar, but secular, cults in the 20th century.
As such, Amis likens Islamism's nostalgic, backward-looking irrationality to nazism - though, since he started writing books about Stalin, Amis throws in Bolshevism too. He dismisses claims that such talk is "an orientalist smear" against Islamism whose anger - so its apologists argue - is only a response to western imperialism.
That view sees two events in the late 40s as crucial scene-setters: the partition of India between Hindus and Muslims (surely at the insistence of Muslims?) and the creation of Israel, compounded by its military defeat of its Arab neighbours and - much later - by the US decision to back the Mujahidin against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
In effect, it says, the terrorist attacks before 9/11, on 9/11 and later are only doing it back. It is the oppressed resisting in the only ways they can. Except, says Amis, it goes much further - to the bits where our imagination fails us.
All those bombers - doctors, jailbirds, football fans, drug addicts, community workers - with their homemade bombs are obsessed with death and martyrdom. Their movement's characteristics include "the exaltation of a godlike leader, the demand, not just for submission to the cause, but for transformation in its name; a self-pitying romanticism; a hatred of liberal society, individualism ... a morbid adolescent rebelliousness combined with a childish love of destruction ... a mania for purification and a ferocious anti-semitism."
That's quite a list and not a bad one. But the fundamental problem is a rejection of reason, of "two and two equals four". Amis bundles up Hitler, the Taliban, Trotsky, those Japanese generals in 1941 who knew they'd lose the war, as deeply irrational.
All right, I know, we're all irrational and may be quietly cooking our planet while worrying about such a transient phenomenon as Osama bin Laden. But these are good questions since we know that well-meaning people on the left have backed very wrong horses in the past.
