The Guardian reported last week that a fight has broken out between Terry Eagle­ton and Martin Amis, who now are both teach­ing at Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­sity. In a new intro­duc­tion to his primer Ide­ol­ogy, Eagle­ton attacks Amis’s views on Islam, coming within a hair’s breadth of call­ing Amis a racist for “The Age of Horrorism,” a three-​part essay Amis pub­lished last year in the Observer. The Guardian has now pub­lished Eagleton’s response to the latest arti­cle, as well as Amis’s letter respond­ing to the response.

When Amis’s essay first showed up, I wrote an essay respond­ing to it. A much-​shortened ver­sion was pub­lished by a U. of Chicago email broad­sheet called Sight­ings. Since the sub­ject has come up again, I thought I’d post the orig­i­nal ver­sion in its entirety below. (Warn­ing: it’s long.)

(Photo by Stuart Price.)

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The Seduc­tion of Reasons

“Courage, sir” is the basic pre­req­ui­site of seri­ous moral thought, and for good reason.

Alden Pyle lives: “I hope we can put this unfor­tu­nate matter behind us quickly.”

So said a State Depart­ment offi­cial in response to the murder of an inno­cent Iraqi bystander by a Black­wa­ter USA “operator.” The offi­cial sug­gested that Black­wa­ter pay the victim’s family $5,000 to hasten the putting.

(Quoted in a new report on Black­wa­ter by the House Com­mit­tee on Over­sight and Gov­ern­ment Reform, which also includes this indictment:

The Black­wa­ter and State Depart­ment records reveal that Blackwater’s use of force in Iraq is fre­quent and exten­sive, result­ing in sig­nif­i­cant casu­al­ties and prop­erty damage. Black­wa­ter is legally and con­trac­tu­ally bound to only engage in defen­sive uses of force to pre­vent “imminent and grave danger” to them­selves or others. In prac­tice, how­ever, the vast major­ity of Black­wa­ter weapons dis­charges are pre­emp­tive, with Black­wa­ter forces firing first at a vehi­cle or sus­pi­cious indi­vid­ual prior to receiv­ing any fire.

Thanks to the data included with the report, “vast majority” can be spec­i­fied exactly: Black­wa­ter shot first 163 out of 195 times, or 84%.)