Amis returns fire in Islam row

From The Guardian:

The novelist Martin Amis has defended himself vigorously against accusations of Islamophobia, claiming that Terry Eagleton's attack is full of "venom and sloth", and suggesting that his colleague at Manchester university should "shut up about it". The row began when Eagleton wrote in an introduction to a revised edition of his primer Ideology: An Introduction that Amis had espoused views appropriate to a "British National Party thug".

Eagleton expanded his attack with a piece in the Guardian that wrongly attributed a series of remarks made by Amis to an essay published by the Observer in September 2006. Eagleton suggested Amis had written: "The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children..."

Amis rejects the claim that he has ever espoused these views, saying that the remarks were made in a newspaper interview and preceded with the following: "What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There's a definite urge - don't you have it? - to say ... [etc, etc]."

More here.