It’s not one of Martin Amis’ better pieces, to be honest. Some of it, indeed, seems more like a parody:
Then came the attacks, in London, of July 7, 2005. And within a matter of hours, it seemed, we were gazing at that truly pitiful contrivance, “7/7” (a nickname, incidentally, that America has not adopted). Well, at least 7/7 was palindromic, and we could evade the day-month anomaly with which we had saddled ourselves; and perhaps we could go on evading it, so long as Islamism confined its “spectaculars” to such dates as January 1, February 2, March 3, and so on. But the postponement was brief. A fortnight later we learnt of the bungled bombings of July 21 – and hereafter the consensus silently cracked. In the press it is not uncommon, now, to see references to “the 21/7 trial” on the same page, or even in the same piece, as the usual stuff about 9/11.
I don’t really care which way round they go: my principal objection to the numbers is that they are numbers. The solecism, that is to say, is not grammatical but moral-aesthetic – an offence against decorum; and decorum means “seemliness”, which comes from soemr, “fitting”, and soema, “to honour”. 9/11, 7/7: who or what decided that particular acts of slaughter, particular whirlwinds of plasma and body parts, in which a random sample of the innocent is killed, maimed or otherwise crippled in body and mind, deserve a numerical shorthand? Whom does this “honour”? What makes this “fitting”? So far as I am aware, no one has offered the only imaginable rationale: that these numerals, after all, are Arabic.
Eh?
Still, it’s worth a read:
[G]iven the choice between George Bush and Osama bin Laden, the liberal relativist, it seems, is obliged to plump for the Saudi, thus becoming the appeaser of an armed doctrine with the following tenets: it is racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitional, imperialist, and genocidal…
Gathering what we can from the works of such thinkers as Sayyid Qutb, Abul Ala Mawdudi, and Abu Bakr Naji (the author of The Management of Savagery), and from various pronouncements, fatwas, ultimatums, death threats, and suicide notes, we may compare radical Islam with the thanatoid political movements we know most about, namely Bolshevism and Nazism (to each of which Islamism is indebted). Of the many affinities that emerge, we may list, to begin with, some secondary characteristics. The exaltation of a godlike leader; the demand, not just for submission to the cause, but for utter transformation in its name; a self-pitying romanticism; a hatred of liberal society, individualism, and affluent inertia (or Komfortismus); an obsession with sacrifice and martyrdom; a morbid adolescent rebelliousness combined with a childish love of destruction; “agonism”, or the acceptance of permanent and unappeasable contention; the use and invocation of the very new and the very old; a mania for purification; and a ferocious antiSemitism.
Mick Hartley 
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