Johann Hari

While we have fixated on our little local worries over the past week, the biggest news story of the year passed unnoticed in the night. The Brazilian government was forced to admit that the destruction of the Amazon rainforest has returned to eco-cidal levels. An area the size of Belgium, taking thousands of years to evolve, was destroyed in the past year alone. Some 20 percent of the forest has now been trashed, with a further 40 percent set to be slashed in my lifetime. This is steadily happening to all the rainforests on earth.

Long after we have forgotten who won the Florida primary or precisely why Peter Hain resigned from the British cabinet, people will be living with the consequences of this news.

The rainforests – with the Amazon by far the largest – are the planet’s air conditioner. They suck up millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases and store them safely out of the atmosphere. But as we hack them down, they are releasing these warming gases. Soon, we will reach a point where there is so much carbon in the atmosphere that the system will pack in and stop extracting anything at all.

We will all feel the heat. It is a stark scientific fact that the last time the world warmed by six degrees Celsius – the upper-end of the UN scientists’ predictions for this century – so quickly, almost everything on earth died.

Comforting though it would be, this is not a story about Those Incompetent Foreigners, unable to look after the world’s forests. The destruction of the Amazon is currently being pushed and promoted by you and me, through both our consumer choices and our tax-money.

The fragile Amazon ecosystem is trapped today in a pincer movement: it is simultaneously being cut down and heated up. Let’s start with the cutting, which has been so severe this winter that Gilberto Camara, head of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, says: “We had never seen this before in Amazonia.” Logging by vast agribusinesses has increased to clear space to produce products for Europe and the US. The biggest slash-and-burn growth industry in Amazonia today is soy production – half of which is then shipped to Europe to feed the animals we are going to milk and eat. A Greenpeace study found that Amazonian soy is in every part of the British food chain, with no major supplier weeding it out. So when you eat a burger, chances are you are effectively eating part of the Amazon.

Logging is also carried out for a range of other rich-world wants. There are currently no legal restrictions in Britain or the US on selling illegal timber pillaged from the Amazon. The craze for biofuels is also (ironically) leading to the burning to rainforest to make way for sugar cane plantations.

And logging doesn’t only trash the trees it chops down and ships off; it also makes the trees it leaves behind much more vulnerable to fire. Until a few decades ago, scientists thought it was impossible for such humid tropical rainforests to burn. But it turns out chopping down trees breaks the dense carapace of leaves that covers the forest, allowing sunlight to break through. This dries out the leaf litter that lies on the floor – turning it into tinder. In a major study of the 1983 Borneo fires, it was found that “forests that had been logged were the ones that burned; unlogged forests resisted fire.”

These slashed-back forests are then being exposed to unnaturally high temperatures, caused by man-made global warming. (That’s you and me again.) In 2005, the Amazon suffered one of the worst droughts in its modern history, and 2007 was almost as bad. Natural variation suggests the Amazon should have serious drought-led fires at 400 to 700 year intervals, but today, they are happening every 5 to 15 years. It’s a vicious cycle: cutting back the forests causes more global warming, which then burns up more forests, which causes more global warming, which burns up the forests even more, and on and on.

The scale of all this is sometimes hard to appreciate: deforestation causes more carbon emissions than every train, plane and automobile on earth.

But you and I do not only wreck the rainforests through our purchasing power; our government is also helpfully doing it for us. The British government is now one of the biggest funders of the World Bank – and their record is plain. In Congo, I saw the second-largest rainforest on earth beginning to be consumed. The logged stumps lay like stubble on a recently-shaved face, and the indigenous pygmies wandered homeless and hopeless.

The World Bank’s own leaked internal investigation admitted they had encouraged vast multinational logging companies to move in and cause “irreversible damage”. Robert Goodland, who worked in a senior position at the Bank for 23 years, says this is no anomaly. He argues that the destruction of the Amazon has been “aided and encouraged by the bank”, because the organisation’s focus is “on helping multi-nationals extract oil, gas and other resources from developing countries.”

This leaves the British government in a bizarre situation. With one hand they are sensibly paying the governments of Guyana and Congo not to cut down their rainforests, while with the other hand they are slathering cash on the World Bank to demand they do the opposite.

So how do you and I stop being part of the problem, and become part of the solution? There are some easy personal choices: cut back or cut out meat, check all the timber you buy, don’t use biofuels. There are some easy governmental choices too: with-hold funds from the World Bank until they radically transform their environmental approach.

But time is short, so we need a much more ambitious approach than that. Brazil’s President Lula da Silva, who controls 60 percent of the Amazon, has been admirably blunt with the world. He gives us two choices. If you want to prevent us from doing with our rainforests what you did with yours, you need to make it worth Brazil’s while: pay us to do it, now. (Oh, and cut your own carbon emissions while you’re at it.) Otherwise we may as well get the money from plundering the forest today, before global warming and illegal logging kills it in a generation anyway.

He’s right. In our own self-defence, the developed countries need to set up a fund – as ambitious as the Marshall Plan – to preserve the remaining rainforests, and thereby prevent drastic destabilisation of our climate. The rainforests will not be left standing by moralistic (and hypocritical) lectures about self-restraint. They will be left standing only if the poor host-countries can make more cash for their people that way.

We have a choice. To our left, there is a global Cash-for-Conservation Plan that leaves us with a lush green Amazon and some chance of preserving a liveable climate. And to our right, there is a dispensable Amazon to take away – hacked down and dying out in a rapidly warming world.

Martin Amis’ tiny blonde daughter answers the door to their vast Primrose Hill house, beaming and waving – and then a moment later, the 58-year old novelist appears behind her, with his sad, semi-scowling face sucking on another roll-up. He leads me through into his front room, a huge, swollen nest of books: paperbacks, hardbacks, fictions, histories. This is where the novels that thrilled me as a teenager – the bitter genius of ‘Money’ and ‘London Fields’, the novels that distilled the eighties – were born. This is where we are going to have to discuss The Race Row.

He seems nervous as he is photographed for this, his first interview since it became standard practice to dub him a racist on the front page of national newspapers. He offers me a slew of absurd compliments: he even tells our photographer I am “handsome”, a claim not even my own grandmother would make. He asked what I would like to drink. A Diet Coke, I say. “Ah,” he replies. “The least cool of all drinks.” He smiles, then vanishes, leaving me with the mountains of books.

And so I wonder anxiously how we are going to do this. In his new book, ‘The Second Plane’, Amis writes that September 11th 2001 was “a day of de-Enlightenment,” the beginning of a global “moral crash”, one that is still thudding and smashing all around us. But his battalions of critics believe this is an unwitting description of the author himself, a portrait of the artist as an ageing man. As the Twin Towers burned and fell, they believe Amis became radically de-Enlightened, and embarked on a “moral crash” where he mooted the collective punishment – “discriminatory stuff” – of all Muslims.

I try to start with getting-to-know-you chit-chat, asking what he missed about Britain when he was living abroad in Uruguay for two and half years. Impatient, he immediately brings up the topic I intended to nudge towards. “I was really impressed to come back and see how – I won’t say multicultural – multiracial London is,” he says. “Thrillingly multiracial. I lived in Queensway for a year when I was in my twenties, but going back to that area now, it’s a whole other level of magnitude. It’s very moving.”

And he has always loved this multiracialism, he says. “At that time I had a Pakistani girlfriend, I had an Iranian girlfriend, I had a South African girlfriend, all of whom were Muslim. It’s interesting, the Iranian one, this is 1969, was mini skirts and discos because she was not an inhabitant of an Islamic Republic but of a decadent monarchy ten years before the revolution. The Pakistani girl was just beginning to kind of Westernise. You would – I don’t know – just look at her and just feel eons between you.” Because of her faithfulness? (Martin is allergic to superstition). “No, no. There were plenty of religious girls. It was that she couldn’t go out with me in public, I could go to her house, and I could be left alone in her room, a big house in High Street Kensington, but we absolutely couldn’t be seen in public.”

He was twenty-two, and his Muslim amour was twenty-one. “I was the first man she had ever kissed, and it wasn’t, there were no tongues or anything. I was having a very hard time with girls at that point, and I thought, ah, a kiss.” He didn’t feel at that time that she was oppressed; it didn’t enter his mind. “I was very respectful of it really, and I was fond of her, but she was very vulnerable, and I wouldn’t have dreamt of…” He trails off. “No. It was after we kissed that I stopped going round.” Was the South African girl the same? “No. She was Muslim, but she had no problems in that area,” he says, and chuckles. He doesn’t know what has become of any of them now.

I There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it?

So how did the man who courted Muslim girls, who says he loves the ethnic swirl of London, end up saying to an interviewer in the summer of 2006:“There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation, further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”

The quote floated past unnoticed in the media torrent until Professor Terry Eagleton fished it out to use in an introduction to a book last autumn – and the race row began. “I really am not racist, and I just don’t feel it,” Amis says, inhaling more nicotine. “You have to look at the timing of the thing. The third jihadist conspiracy in thirteen months [to blow up a series of jumbo jets over the Atlantic] had just been exposed. My children were taking trans-Atlantic flights all that summer. And – I know this is sublime-ridiculous – but I had just had someone come up from London to stay and they were telling me how they couldn’t take a book on a trans-Atlantic flight. I just thought this was a triumph for the forces of stupidity, literalism, ignorance, humourlessness.” He says he isn’t going to deny he felt that way, for a moment – but it wasn’t a proposal, just a “thought experiment”, and it wasn’t “racist, just retaliatory.”

But is this true? Your impulse wasn’t to retaliate against the people who committed the crime. No: your impulse was to moot punishing people who were innocent of any crime at all.

He replies haltingly, “It seems on actuarial, evidential grounds they [Muslims] are more likely to be interested in that [terrorism]. And really it was the impulse –” he pauses, considering his words carefully. “I’m assuming that ninety five per cent at least of Muslims are longing to get their house in order, and hate this extremism. I said this to [the former Islamist] Ed Hussain and he said yeah, about ninety five per cent. So really the feeling was to say then, you can imagine a state would end up coming to the point where…” Again he pauses. “Say it [jihadi violence] was happening every couple of weeks, are you telling me the state wouldn’t do something about it? It’s worth thinking about this, [a situation where] you’re trying to bring pressure on the whole community.”

Amis adds quickly, “If it was white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who were doing this, do you think I would be inert about that? I would welcome restrictions on my own existence if it was going to suppress the level of violence.”

This seems to be a defence of collective punishment, in certain circumstances. He has said that he was furious when his little daughter and her fluffy duck were searched at the airport, and wanted to snap, “Stick to young men who look like they’re from the Middle East.” Do you advocate racial profiling now, Martin? “I’m not… I’ve never advocated it,” he says. But you sound like you might, I say. “I would certainly… Well, some people say it’s ineffective, which is very counterintuitive, I would have thought. If you make a list of all the people who have committed terroristic acts and see what their provenance is, and if they are all, if they turn out to be white Anglo-Saxon protestants, search them. You would have to look into it very carefully. It’s not a moral question. It’s expediency, and something you hate to do, but if this increases, if this goes up a magnitude, these are questions we will face.”

Yet he is clearly shaken by the accusation of racism: he spits out lines from the critical articles by Eagleton, Ronan Bennett and others verbatim. At one moment, it looks like his hand is shaking. He insists, “I don’t think anyone sided with Eagleton… It’s a self-evident absurdity to think I’m sitting here hating at least a billion people. I don’t have the capacity for that. It’s always said that being a snob is very tiring because you can’t come off duty. It’s a real eighteen hour a day job. Being a racist must knacker you to your last atom every half an hour.”

Yes. But imagine that at the time of the 2006 Lebanon War, also unfolding that summer, a prominent novelist had adumbrated harassing and deporting Jews until they got ‘their’ house in order. What would you have said, Martin? “It’s completely meaningless,” he replies. “Jews aren’t blowing themselves up in London.” But Muslims en masse aren’t blowing themselves up either; a handful of individual Muslims are. The point of the thought experiment is that both scenarios – yours and mine – punish innocent people who have nothing to do with the crime, and no power over it.

He rides over this point, talking instead about Israel. “This is the thing you come up against that I really don’t understand. I know it’s a great tradition of the British left to support Palestine, but when you come up against this question, you can feel the intelligence and balance leaving the hall with a shriek, and people getting into this endocrinal state about Israel. I just don’t understand it. The Jews have a much, much worse history than the Palestinians, and in living memory. But there’s just no impulse of sympathy for that…. I know we’re supposed to be grown up about it and not fling around accusations of anti-Semitism, but I don’t see any other explanation. It’s a secularised anti-Semitism. Do you want another drink yet?”

Slightly thrown, I say no. And with that, he vanishes from the room, leaving clouds of black smoke in the air.

II Kingsley’s reaction to 9/11

Martin Amis’ critics claim he is devolving into his father, the scowling, spitting misanthrope who somehow distilled the spirit of the 1950s into his novel ‘Lucky Jim’. Kingsley was, towards the end of his life, a militant defender of the Vietnam War, a harrumphing foe of feminism, and said of Apartheid South Africa: “You should shoot as many blacks as possible.”

I don’t think this analysis of Martin is right – but when he returns clutching a beer, I ask him how Kingsley would have responded to September 11th. He responds by unwittingly describing his image of himself in his own mind. “I think he would have been very staunch,” he says. “I think he would have seen it as threatening everything he cared about, which it clearly does. I don’t think he would have been racist.” He puts the beer down and lights another roll-up. “I don’t think much is required of you to see that this is a manifestation of evil that we ought to be quite good at recognising – and which we’re not.”

Yet there are other descriptions of Kingsley which keep flickering past my mind as possible explanations for Martin’s metamorphosis. His closest friend Philip Larkin suspected that Kingsley “felt nothing deeply.” One of Larkin’s girlfriends said, “Kingsley wasn’t just making faces all the time, he was actually trying them on. He didn’t know who he was.”

This seems like a working hypothesis, at least: that Martin has always been a great prose writer with nothing to say, casting around for a transcendent cause. He has flicked through the Moral Rolodex of the concentration camps (with his novel Time’s Arrow), environmental destruction (London Fields), nuclear weapons (Einstein’s Monsters) the gulags (House of Meetings), and now alighted on the rubble of the World Trade Centre. Could it be this numbness that draws him time after time to apocalyptic scenarios? Is the global jihad is just the latest apocalypse to come along and lend gravity to his burning but hollow prose?

One more line about Kingsley comes to me as Martin talks. His second wife Jane said of him: “The truth was, I think, that he wasn’t a political animal. It was more that he enjoyed the chappish company of people for whom politics was the social peg upon which they hung their conviviality.”

Is this true of the son? I’m not sure. He certainly seems at times uncertain with his source material. In ‘The Second Plane’, he gets a quote from Ken Livingstone seriously wrong, claiming he justified the 7/7 suicide-murders, when he did no such thing. At times, he has seemed to misunderstand the nature of Shia Islam. He has not been to meet any Islamists to test his theories, even though you can find plenty in Finsbury Park, a few tube stops away.

III A continent called Eurabia

Martin has waded deepest into Kingsley territory when he chooses to promote the writings of a Canadian ex-disk-jockey called Mark Steyn. His recent book 'America Alone' is a guidebook to a continent called Eurabia in the year 2020. Its old European shell looks familiar; "most of" the old Cathedrals and boulevards "still stand" in Rome and London and Paris. But the Islamic National Republican Coalition has just won the French elections - only the latest nation-sized domino to fall to the Islamists. Alcohol is already banned in the Netherlands and Denmark. The continent's women are veiled. The gay clubs are long since shut and shuttered, "relocated to San Francisco."

The "mass evacuations" of white people began five years ago, as the "supposedly Greater France" began "remorselessly evolving month by month into Greater Bosnia." America is left alone, the last country to resist being "reprimitivized".

Amis tells me Steyn is “a great sayer of the unsayable.” Muslims are indeed reproducing at a faster rate than the rest of us, he says, and they will eventually outbreed us and become a majority. “One of the mathematical beauties of democracy is that you can look at the figures and be pretty sure how it’s going to fall out,” he says. “It’s not PC, it’s so saturated in revulsions that people can’t go near it. [But] we should go near it... Just because of there have been horrible abuses based on this [way of thinking] doesn’t mean that it’s not worth considering, or that it’s so radioactive that you don’t dare go near it. That is the defeat of reason.”

I grimace. I loathe and detest Islamic fundamentalists just as much as Amis - but this is going way beyond criticism of Islamic fundamentalism. It presents each new Muslim child – a Salman Rushdie, or a Salman Rushdie-killer – as a problem. Amis concedes readily that Steyn “writes like a nutter” and is “a very unstable kind of mind,” but quickly adds, “you’ve got to be able to talk about race.” Is this a revealing Freudian slip? Does he mean culture? But he is continuing: “The hair trigger sensitisation of this question is not rational, not healthy, not anything. It’s a fetish. You know, he [Steyn] quotes Muslims as saying Europe will be an Islamic continent.”

Well, sort of, I say – Steyn quotes two Muslims saying this: a random nutcase preacher from Sweden, and that renowned demographer Colonel Gaddafi. But his argument is filled with more holes than that, I add. The demographics are nothing like Steyn describes them – today, around 3 percent of Europeans are Muslims, so it takes absurd arithmetic acrobatics to make them a majority this side of 2100, by which time it is far more likely Muslims will have assimilated to European birth-patterns.

But more importantly, Steyn’s thesis presumes that virtually every Muslim – including the women, and the gays – wants to live under a vicious theocracy, and that the (fantastical) moment they reach fifty percent, they would vote as a block to turn Europe into the Ayatollah’s Iran. “Well, that’s an imponderable,” Amis says. “Once they’re a majority, you don’t know, things change, the proportion that wants Sharia law is subject to expansion or contraction, but it’s not stable. But [you can get] this sort of triumphalism that is common to all social groups and is strong in Islam. Bernard Lewis has said many times it is the nature of Islam to dominate, and how are you going to dominate if you are a majority? By impressing your culture on the surrounding culture.”

Then he adds, “What are the figures about wanting Sharia law? I actually have a print off somewhere of a quite thorough poll on questions like homophobia… They’re certainly homophobic, [and] it says in the Koran [you should] strike a woman on suspicion of disobedience. You can imagine a kind of creeping Sharia. I’m not saying that this would be an inevitable consequence, I’m saying that the situation is dynamic.”

Could you really read Steyn’s book, I ask, without finding it overtly racist? He talks about "the Yellow Peril" and "gooks". He notes nostalgically that "in the old days, the white man settled the Indian [sic] territory" whereas now the savages are settling us. He describes as "correct" a friend who talks about "beturbanned prophet-monkeys." Of course, Steyn denies this is connected to race, writing, "To agitate about what proportion of the population is "white" is grotesque and inappropriate. But it's not about race; it's about culture." Yet it quickly becomes clear that for him, culture is merely a thinly veiled mask for race - and then the mask slips entirely.

I read Amis a sentence where Steyn appears to be gloating about more white babies being born: "Those who pooh-pooh that the United States' comparatively robust demographics say they reflect nothing more than the fecundity of Hispanic immigration... In fact, white women in America still breed at a greater rate - 1.85 or so - than white women in Europe or Canda." Amis waves his hand through the air dismissively. “Aren’t you being a little legalistic here in an attempt to… you’re being over-vigilant. I don’t think that’s clinching at all.”

He then drags Steyn’s arguments into a whole other swamp of reaction. “He doesn’t even dare say it actually,” he says, “but his thesis is that when you allow women to choose [through contraception and abortion], you will face demographic disaster, because they won’t choose to have the necessary amount of children. The reason that America is the only first world country with a non-declining birth rate is because of all those things we hate about it, you know – [it’s] patriarchal, church going. I’m going to take this up because I think it’s such an enormous question – has feminism cost us Europe?”

I pause. So are you saying we need to restore those misogynist values in Europe, to fend off a Muslim demographic tide? “My, that’s an appalling idea,” he says, smiling. “But I do think it is amazing, of the unsuspected weakness of the desire to reproduce, women don’t want to have children. They may want one, but they don’t want two or more. Who would have thought that? We thought that was an absolute basic human fact. It isn’t.”

Another cigarette is lit, and he says, “You only have to look at these demographic figures to know what you’re going to get, and you’ve got it in Iraq…. I mean, it’s a gang plank to theocracy. What are they going to vote for? Iraq is a controlled experiment of what happens when you bring democracy to a country that isn’t ready for it.” Again, he seems to be subconsciously seeing Muslims as a homogenous mass. I ask if he really views third generation European Muslims as on a par with Iraqis emerging from the rubble of Saddamism and sanctions. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t buy anyone’s thesis on anything. It’s not unreasonable to suppose a majority is going to assert itself. How thoroughly, in what form, how fundamentalistically, we won’t know… But it has to be discussed. You mustn’t start getting in a tizzy about white supremacism when you read these figures.”

IV Snark-hunting

I feel the air freezing up with tension and stale smoke, so I decide to try a different tactic. I want to trace the moments where he has publicly changed his mind – always a brave act. It seems hard to remember it now, but in his immediate response to the September 11th massacres, he said that American foreign policy itself had played a role in smelting jihadism. “It will be horribly difficult and painful for Americans to absorb the fact that they are hated, and hated intelligibly,” he said, in a piece reprinted in full in ‘The Second Plane.’ “How many of them know, for example, that their government has destroyed at least five percent of the Iraqi population [through sanctions]?” He said the US population suffered from “a deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away”, and would have to go through “a revolution in consciousness [and] and adaptation of national character: the work, perhaps, of a generation.”

But today, he mocks people who offer these arguments, dubbing it “rationalist naïveté.” He says: “Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, ‘What are the reasons for this?’ It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.” For him now, jihadism is an irrational psychosis emerging in the void, an emanation of our most base instincts and nothing more. “It’s pathological, it’s always there – the subterranean world, where fantasies and violent urges, every now and again come to the surface disguised as ideas.”

When I ask him about this initial response he says brusquely, “Oh, by the end of the month I was finished with all that. But some people seem stuck there, in that rationalist response.”

I have found myself skidding into a conversational dead-end, where I am simply banging my head against his sentences – so I decide to offer praise instead. It was brave of that you admitted last year to having some residual racist impulses, as we all inevitably do. “It’s delusive to say that you are some kind of pious post-historical automaton [for whom] five million years of tribalism have just evaporated,” you said, before adding: “I think I’m pretty free of racism, but I get little impulses, urges and atavisms now and then.” What are they? Can you give me an example?

He looks irritated; my tactic has failed. “I must say I think you’re slightly snark-hunting, because the racist impulse isn’t there. I’ve never advocated anything of this kind, and I think the cynicism of Eagleton and Bennett is that they know I haven’t done that.”

V The two Martins

“Can I just say something?” he says, leaning forward, warm again. “One of the reasons I reacted the way I did [in August 2006] is because I am protective of our multiracial society. I thought – they’re going to fuck it up. Look at London, this amazing multiracial city, but there’s a few miserable bastards, who through an absolutely vile brew of dreams of impotence, or omnipotence, and sadism, and the love of blood and sadism and horror, are going to ruin it for us. It wasn’t just about protecting white people. A multiracial society is very vulnerable to that kind of thing.” If he has racist impulses, then the anti-racist antibodies soon flood in after them.

Amis’ cognitive dissonance seems to squat in the room, like a physical presence. With the right lobe of his brain, Amis tells me he loves our multiracial society, and he says it with vigour and rigour, not in a dull some-of-my-best-friends-are-black rote. I don’t for a second think he’s lying. But then with the left lobe he passionately praises a writer who seems to me to be an outright racist, one who damns virtually all Muslims as secret sharia-carriers and brags that the “white” birth-rate is still higher in the US. It is as though Amis has been fractured by the kerosene blast of September 11th into two people – and they aren’t talking.

They continue to gabble over each other. Just a few minutes after wondering if feminism has drained women’s will to reproduce and “lost us Europe”, he tells me his forthcoming novel – ‘The Pregnant Widow’ – is a celebration of the sexual revolution and feminism. “I am a gynocrat,” he says. “I think the world would be better if women ruled it.” Feminism today is only in “its second trimester”, he adds, and when it reaches delivery it will make the world an even better place.

And beneath the sound of ideologies clashing inside him, I can still trace remnants of Amis’ left-wing late-youth. He continues to advocate nuclear disarmament, saying the existing nuclear powers should immediately begin working towards “the zero option.” He is proud to have opposed the Iraq War, where he says “we have created a fresh kind of Hell.”

As I stumble out into the Primrose Hill drizzle, I feel like I have been watching a boxing match in Amis’ brain. He waves goodbye and shuts the door. I stand at the gate, wondering if the Steyn-hugging round-‘em-up impulses – speaking with his father’s sneering voice – will deliver a knock-out blow to the other Martin: the nuclear-disarming multiracialist who remembers his Muslim girlfriends with a sweet smile. I hope not. If the fantasies prevail, one of our best novelists will disappear, raving, into the long Eurabian night.

I have written other articles that touch on these themes. You can read my interview with Salman Rushdie here, with Irshad Manji here, and Shazia Mirza here.

You can read my arguments about why the 'demographic' argument used by Amis is in my view wrong here, and here.

You can read my response to charges of 'Islamophobia' against me here.

I'm up against the Daily Telegraph's Janet Daley.

When I was a child, not so long ago, there was a BBC TV programme called ‘Tomorrow’s World’. Every week, the presenters would show us fantastical pieces of technology that would, in The Distant Future, remake the world. A telephone you could carry everywhere, in a little briefcase of its own! A special machine that would tell you where your car was, and give you directions to your destination in a smooth, soft voice! A set of computers all wired together that could communicate across long distances and contain reams of information for all to see!

Now we all live in an episode of Tomorrow’s World, faster than we could possibly have imagined. It’s easy – and a little trite – to gush with Panglossian glee about the internet. But, still. Today, anyone with a laptop and an internet connection has access to a heftier chunk of humanity’s knowledge than the most privileged visitor to the Great Library of Alexandria in the third century BC, or the British Library Reading Room just a generation ago. Want George Elliot’s novels, Einstein’s scientific papers or Paris Hilton’s genitals? Just click here.

It is hard not to feel dizzy at the bizarre new connections of ideas and people and money that are suddenly surging across continents. I have a gay Muslim friend, for example, who spends all day talking to Israeli soldiers on webcams, partly for aesthetic reasons and partly to persuade them to leave the West Bank. That conversation – and tens of millions even odder still – would have been impossible five years ago. Today, you can almost feel the broadband cables hum with them.

It is increasingly clear that the internet is going to be a transformative moment in human history as significant as the invention of the printing press. In 1450, a decade after Johannes Guttenberg invented the printing press, even the most astute watchers could have only begun to squint at the changes it would spur. In time, it made popular nationalism possible, because linguistic communities could communicate with each other independently, in one language, and form a sense of community. It dissolved the medieval stranglehold of information held by the churches and Kings, making it possible for individuals to read the Bible for themselves – and to violently reject the readings used by authority to strengthen their rule. Communications technologies rewire our brains; they make us into a different species.

A decade after the invention of the internet, can we too squint at the changes it is bringing? Just as the printing press made it possible for national groups to bond together, the internet makes it possible for pan-national groups to see themselves as one. Oddly, the first group to really grasp this ultra-modern potential have been people who pine for the moral strictures of the seventh century desert: radical Islamists. Thirty years ago, a Muslim lad in Leeds suffering from second-generation blues who thought he had more in common with a teenager in Gaza or Baghdad or Grozny than with a non-Muslim up the road would have been very odd. Today, it’s not so implausible: he can spend all day speaking to those teenagers on Skype, watching videos of atrocities against them, and dreaming of hellish atrocities of his own.

Al Quaida is increasingly shaped like the internet, with no centre, just thousands of connecting cables at the perimeter, because it is increasingly a product of the internet. In time, other new identities – ones we can’t guess at yet – will burgeon online.

But what effect is the internet having on our thinking muscles? I am torn about this. In his brilliant new book ‘The Assault on Reason’, Al Gore argues that we are slowly emerging from the Age of Television. That period, he says, rolled back reasoned thought, because it bombarded us with unthinking emotive images. “The world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation,” he says. “Individuals receive, but they cannot send.” The internet, by contrast, can mark a rejuvenation of reason and democracy – because it is a return to two-way communication and text.

I instinctively want to agree with Gore, but then I look at the primary form of web-based communication after porn: blogs. With a few exceptions, the form of communication blogs most resemble is talk radio, lending themselves to short bursts of harsh invective. It isn’t a medium that talks; it sneers and shouts. This isn’t because of the lazy stereotype that bloggers are all sad Pyjamahideen ranting, but because it is a medium consumed in short bursts. It has to catch your attention fast and hard, and leave you with a sting.

Most websites are designed on the same assumption: you will spend ten seconds on each one before you click on, and on, and on. The neuroscientist Susan Greenfield says IT culture is changing our neural configurations, shortening our attention spans and whittling down our imaginations. We might have access to the Library of Alexandria, but all we are checking out is the contents page and the pictures. This is, I sometimes fear, the spider in the world-wide web.

But is it true? There is some evidence on the other side: a recent study gave Michigan schoolchildren computers in their bedrooms, in return for monitoring their use. It found that their reading scores and their grades were higher the more time they spent online. (Time spent watching TV had the opposite effect). Yet the average time spent reading books is falling in favour of the web. So it seems that reading mostly-junk online makes you better at reading books offline, but it also makes you less inclined to do it. It’s a strange conundrum: is this is boon or not?

But amidst all these debates, there is a looming, almost unnoticed threat to the future of the internet. The massive corporations that provide broadband access own the physical hightways of the internet: the wires and cables and switches along which web pages travel before they hit your screen. Over the past few years, they have been lobbying in both the US and Europe for permission to turn this into a two-lane motorway, with different speeds according to how much you can pay. Under their proposed system, if you are a big corporation like Nike or Microsoft, you would pay a premium fee and travel on the fastest lane, with your page getting to users at super-speed. If you are just an unknown blogger, you pay the standard fee, and you will be stuck in the piled-up broadband traffic, taking much longer to update or use.

This is called a “tiered” internet – and it has to be resisted. The greatest thing about the web is that the entry costs are so low: we all plug and play on an equal basis. Under the new model, we would no longer compete in a somewhat open market of ideas; instead, arguments would be rigged even more grossly in favour of the rich.

As the internet reshapes our minds and souls in ways we are only beginning to comprehend, we have to fight to keep it equally open to everyone. Otherwise, Tomorrow’s World will become a corporate-controlled world, with inequality built into the cables that connect us all.

POSTSCRIPT: In my column today, I talk about some of the different ways the rise of the internet is remaking our lives. There’s dozens of dimensions I didn’t have space to touch on: the way internet porn is transforming the sexuality of young people, which I wrote about
here, for starters.

But I’d like to talk here about one very specific dimension: we have been asking for years now why immigrants appear to be integrating less thoroughly across the developed world. Well, if you immigrated to Britain a century ago, as my descendants did, you left the Old Country behind because you had to. It was suddenly extremely far-off and inaccessible, except through the odd letter. You had no choice but to make new links; the old ones were severed by distance. But today, you can move to London but effectively stay in Poland or Pakistan or Paraguay in your mind: you can watch the TV from home, talk to friends from home for hours on Skype, hear the news podcasts about your old city, and so on.

In my East London apartment block alone, there are people who live effectively in Ghana and China and Colombia, just as I effectively live much of the time in the United States and France.

I don’t say this in any way as a criticism – I would do exactly the same if I had to leave London out of economic or political necessity, and as regular readers will know, I am passionately in favour of immigration and asylum rights.

But I do think this change has policy implications: our schools need to do much more to communicate a shared culture, and worry less about stressing difference. People will naturally and of their own choice be different; it’s the government’s job to help build up the things we have in common – to smelt a national glue. In an ever-more fragmented web-based culture, where we can live in different cultural worlds with ease, we need it ever-more.

You can comment on this article, and read the comments of others, here.

There's also been a partial translation into French for Courrier International:

Le chroniqueur anglais Johann Hari analyse une menace qui pèse sur l'avenir d'Internet. "Les grandes sociétés qui fournissent l'accès à Internet en possèdent aussi les chemins physiques : les fils, les câbles et les interrupteurs tout au long desquels les pages internet voyagent avant d'atteindre votre écran. Les fournisseurs d'accès ont fait du lobbying aux Etats-Unis et en Europe pour avoir la permission de créer une autoroute à deux voies, avec des vitesses différentes selon le prix que vous pouvez payer. D'après leur proposition, si vous êtes une grande entreprise (...), vous pouvez payer un prix plus élevé qui vous permet de circuler sur la voie la plus rapide, avec des pages qui se chargent à toute vitesse. Si vous êtes un simple bloggeur anonyme, vous payez le prix normal, et vous serez coincé dans le gros du trafic et vous aurez besoin de plus de temps pour charger ou réactualiser vos pages. Ceci s'appelle un Internet à plusieurs vitesses - et il faut le combattre. La plus belle chose au sujet du Web est que les coûts d'entrée sont très bas : nous sommes tous branchés et nous jouons sur une base égale. Avec le nouveau modèle, nous ne serions plus en concurrence dans un marché d'idées ouvert à tous...."

A lazy, hazy myth has arisen out of the mists of New Hampshire and South Carolina. Across the pan-Atlantic press, the grizzled 71 year-old Vietnam vet John McCain is being billed as the Republican liberals can live with. He is “a bipartisan progressive”, “a principled hard liberal”, “a decent man” – in the words of liberal newspapers. His fragile new front-runner status as we go into Super Tuesday is being seen as something to cautiously welcome, a kick to the rotten Republican establishment.

But the truth is that McCain is the candidate we should most fear. Not only is he to the right of Bush on a whole range of subjects – he is also the Republican candidate most likely to dispense with Hillary or Barack.

McCain is third-generation navy royalty, raised from a young age to be a senior figure in the Armed Forces, like his father and grandfather before him. He was sent to one of the most elite boarding schools in America, then to a naval academy where he ranked 894th out of 899 students in ability. He used nepotism to get ahead: when he was rejected by the National War College, he used his father’s contacts with the Secretary of the Navy to make them reconsider. He then swiftly married the heiress to a multi-million dollar fortune.

Right up to his twenties, he remained a strikingly violent man, “ready to fight at the drop of a hat,” according to his biographer Robert Timberg. This rage seems to be at the core of his personality: describing his own childhood, McCain has written: “At the smallest provocation I would go off into a mad frenzy, and then suddenly crash to the floor unconscious. When I got angry I held my breath until I blacked out.”

But he claims he was transformed by his experiences in Vietnam – a war he still defends as “noble” and “winnable,” if only it had been fought harder. (More than three million Vietnamese died; how much harder could it be? Well, McCain’s political hero Barry Goldwater wanted the US to use nuclear weapons against the Viet Cong.) His plane was shot down on a bombing raid over Hanoi, and he was captured and tortured for five years. To this day, he cannot lift his arms high enough to comb his own hair.

On his release, he used his wife’s fortune to run to as a Republican senator. He was a standard-issue Reaganite corporate Republican – until the Keating Five corruption scandal consumed him. In 1987, it was revealed that McCain, along with four other senators, had taken huge campaign donations from a fraudster called Charles Keating. In return they pressured government regulators not to look too hard into Keating’s affairs – allowing him to commit even more fraud. McCain later admitted “I did it for no other reason than I valued [Keating’s] support.”

McCain took the only course that could possibly preserve his reputation: he turned the scandal into a debate about the political system, rather than his own personal corruption. He said it showed how “we need to drive the special interests out of Washington”, and became a high-profile campaigner for campaign finance reform. But privately, his behaviour hasn’t changed much. For example, in 2000 he lobbied federal regulators hard on behalf of a major campaign contributor, Paxson Communications, in an act the regulators spluttered was “highly unusual.” He has never won an election without outspending his opponent – sometimes by vast amounts.

But McCain has distinguished himself most as an uber-hawk on foreign policy. To give a brief smorgasbord of his views: at a recent rally, he sang “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” to the tune of the Beach Boy’s ‘Barbra Ann.’ He says North Korea should be threatened with “extinction.” He believes Bush has been too soft on drugs in Afghanistan, and must launch a renewed assault on Afghan poppy farmers – some of the poorest people on earth.

McCain has mostly opposed using US power for humanitarian goals, jeering at proposals to intervene in Rwanda or Bosnia – but he is very keen to use it for great power imperialism. He learned this philosophy from his father and his granddad Slew, who fought in the Philippine wars at the turn of the twentieth century, where he was part of a mission to crush the local resistance to the US invasion. They did it by forcing the entire population from their homes at gunpoint into ‘protection zones’, and gunning down anybody over the age of ten who was found outside them. Today, McCain dreamily describes this as “an exotic adventure” which his grandfather “generally enjoyed.”

Then McCain’s father John led the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, at a time when there was a conflict on the Caribbean island. On one side, there were forces loyal to Juan Bosch, the democratically elected left-wing President who was committed to land redistribution and helping the poor. On the other side, there were forces who had overthrown the elected government and looked nostalgically to the playboy tyranny of Rafael Trujilo. John McCain Sr. intervened to ensure the supporters of the democratic government were crushed, bragging that it taught the natives “how to behave themselves.” He saw this as part of a wider mission, where the US would take over Britain’s role as a “world empire.” His son describes him now as “a hero” with “a great vision.”

These beliefs drive McCain today. He brags he would be happy for US troops to remain in Iraq for one hundred years, and declares: “I’m not at all embarrassed of my friendship with Henry Kissinger; I’m proud of it.” His most thorough biographer – and recent supporter – Matt Welch concludes: “McCain’s programme for fighting foreign wars would be the most openly militaristic and interventionist platform in the White House since Teddy Roosevelt… [it] is considerably more hawkish than anything George Bush has ever practised.” With him as President, we could expect much more aggressive destabilisation of Venezuela and Bolivia – and more.

So why do so many nice liberals have a weak spot for McCain? Well, to his credit, he doesn’t hate immigrants: he proposed a programme to legalize the twelve million undocumented workers in the US. He sincerely opposes torture, as a survivor of it himself. He has apologised for denying global warming right up to 2000, and now advocates a cap on greenhouse gas emissions – but only if China and India can also be locked into the system. He is somewhat uncomfortable with the religious right (while supporting a ban on abortion and gay marriage). It is a sign of how far to the right the Republican Party has drifted that these are considered signs of liberalism, rather than basic humanity.

Yet these sprinklings of sanity – onto a very extreme programme – are enough for a superficial, glib press to present McCain as “bipartisan” and “centrist.” Will this be enough to put white hair into the White House? At the moment, he has considerably higher positive ratings than Hillary Clinton, and beats her in some match-up polls. If we don’t start warning that the Real McCain is not the Real McCoy, we might sleepwalk into four more years of Republicanism.

You can read my take on the wider Republican field here, on the Democratic contenders here, and on Rudi Giuliani here and here. You can read my article about the Republican attempt to rig the 2008 election
here.

You can read my reporting on the 2004 Republican convention in New York City here, here, and here.

Feedback is welcome at j.hari -at- independent.co.uk

Nathan Shaked has been crowned International Mr Gay 2007 in the gay world’s biggest, glitziest global beauty pageant – but when Attitude meets up with him in a glitzy London hotel, he seems to belong to a different species from the stereotypical shrieking, air-headed gay beauty queen.

Nathan was conscripted to be a soldier in the Israeli army, and chose to stay beyond the mandatory three year term. Then he became a top-flight commercial lawyer, becoming a partner in his firm. And now, at the age of 37, he is a mega-bucks businessman, owning a chain of high-end gyms in Tel Aviv. He’s ain’t Miss Congeniality: he is a tough, hard-headed man’s man, with a brain as sharp as his abs.

JH: How does the Mr Gay contest actually work?

NS: Well, you win in your own country, and then you are sent to Florida, and the contest is in three parts. The first day, Friday, we went rock-climbing. (Laughs). I know it sounds odd, but they were trying to test our leadership skills. The second stage was an interview with the judging panel. For most of the contestants, the interview lasts five minutes, but with me we went on for half an hour because I was talking about Islam and gay issues and the peace process. And the third part was where they got us into our swimming costumes. You know, to represent gay people, they think you have to have a nice face, because it’s easier to relate to people who look nice. Then I won, and it was very American – lots of noise and fireworks and balloons. I was very pleased.

JH: Almost straight after winning, you were plunged into a controversy back in Israel. There were plans to hold a gay Pride rally in Jerusalem, and there was a really shocking and extreme religious backlash against it.

NS: Yes, because I was on the news already, I was really like the gay person the news organisations wanted to interview. There were a lot of rabbis prepared to go on television to condemn it, so they needed some gay people to talk back. There was a debate in court, and the police said that they could not guarantee our security if we were going to be in the streets. So it was held in a stadium, which is really not the point of Pride. So, it was ridiculous when you think about it, in the twenty-first century, in a country that is said to be a modern country, people cannot express who they are.

JH: How did you feel about the abuse directed at you personally?

NS: You know that I’ve learned not to really respond to people who saying things which are, to me, more than ridiculous. I can relate to situations when you have differences of opinions. As long as we sit as two human beings and talk about different issues, it doesn't matter how hard or how harsh those issues are, I can deal with it. However, when somebody regards me as not a human being, when someone regards me as an animal, we have no common ground. Should I try to convince him that I'm a human being? It is just a ridiculous discussion.

But I try to appeal to people who are not that extreme, but who just don’t know what gays are all about. You know, you live in London, I live in Tel Aviv, and it’s very open to gays, very trendy maybe. But to a lot of people gays are a complete mystery. So when you say you are gay there, they think about the stereotype. They picture a very effeminate person, very delicate, because that is what they see on the television. Whenever there is a gay character on Israeli television, his is that type. That's the television because they want ratings, so they won't be looking for just normal gay men. The result of this is when a gay person, a gay young boy, sixteen years old, discovers he is gay, he is terrified about it. He knows that when he tells his mother she will think, basically, ‘Oh my god, I have a woman in the house!’ That’s what she sees on television.

So what I'm going to try to do is I'll try to visit places, show myself in places to show a gay can be just a normal man, act normally. It's OK we have in our community gays who are a little bit effeminate, but we have every kind of gay person, and it the stereotype doesn’t define us. It is not what we are all about.

JH: One way you obviously defy that stereotype is that you were a successful soldier. Was it hard being gay in the army?

NS: In Israel, the army does not have any restrictions on gay people at all. We have conscription, so everybody goes at eighteen. And you leave your mother, you leave your family, you leave your warm bed. It is very harsh, very different to what you used to have, at first. And if you are gay you're even more lonely. Everybody's talking about their girlfriend, and everybody's talking about the things that are up to sexually, so you lie and say, “Yes, I was with my girlfriend this weekend,’ which is a complete lie. There are very few really, really brave guys who are 18 who say, “I'm gay, I don't give a shit about it.” In the army people are prejudiced because they worry that if they say they are gay, they won’t be seen as fighters any more. Just because they are gay.

JS: But you stayed in the army longer than you had to.

NS: Yes, for a few reasons. First of all I enjoyed my service, and I had great friends, even though I was in the closet, even though I couldn't talk about my sexuality. You get used to life there, but what’s so terrible is you learn to be a professional liar. You lie so much, you forget the truth sometimes. So I lied, that is what I did. And secondly, I think it might sound a little bit strange to you, but in Israel I think it is important to do the best you can. I don't take it for granted that we live in Israel, it’s something that took us a long time to achieve and it’s not obvious we will be able to stay this way.

JH: Did you serve in the occupied Palestinian territories?

NS: I don’t want to say where I served.

JH: Why?

NS: I don’t think it’s appropriate for this interview.

JH: When you were in the army did you have a boyfriend secretly?

NS: I had a – well, I don’t call him a boyfriend. I was in the army, he was in the army, we met sometimes for sex. It was not really a love relationship If our days off were corresponding at the same time, we would hook up.

JH: And would you feel obliged to go with women or to have a pretend girlfriend?

NS: There are lots of women in the Israeli army, and I would usually have this girl in my life, who I was pretending to everyone else I was going out with. It would two to three weeks, because I never got it take to a situation where I would have sex with them. So the minute it was getting that serious, and the woman wanted to get to the next stage, I would call it off.

JH: You came out quite late, didn’t you – when you were thirty?

JH: Yes, because I was terrified that I would be discriminated against by my friends. I had people I considered to be my best friends, and over the years they had told me their most delicate secrets, and I had lied to them all along. I thought they were going to be very angry with me. I also thought they wouldn’t consider me as part of the group any more. They would think I was different. Then when I was 30, I woke up one morning and decided I could not keep living a life that doesn't makes me happy any more.

I had become a lawyer after I left the army, and I didn’t want to do that any more. I was a partner, and I had a great office, and lots of money, but at the end of the day, I was a litigator, and that kind of law is all about doing bad things in many, many cases. It’s all built on somebody’s suffering. And you are constantly lying. I didn’t want to tell lies any more.

So I quit my job, and I wanted to come out too. But to get out of the closet is a process, it's not so easy. So I was at a party with a friend of mine and he was checking out a good-looking girl, and he got me to look at her. And I said, ‘Yes, she’s good-looking. But I think her boyfriend is even more hot.’ He looked at me strangely and then we talked about something else. And the next morning he called me, and said, you know, I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday. And I told him I was gay. And then in twenty minutes, all my friends knew! It was like a fire, shoooo!

That evening there was a birthday party of a friend of mine, and all my friends gathered around and said it was okay. It was great! Then they were asking me questions about gay behaviour and gay sex… So that was it. In addition to that, my mother called me to say she needed to talk to me. Now, my mother never needs to talk with me. She said, “One of the parents of one your friends gave me a call, and she said that you came out.” Nothing really changed in my life, as far as people's behaviour towards me. But I started to live with no fears, and it was so nice, and so refreshing.

JH: You said in an interview that your brother had not reacted well.

NS: My brother is not reacted well. I can't get why, maybe he needs to get used to the idea, I don't know. I just have to do the best I can to change attitudes, and hopefully that can include my brother eventually.

JH: Of course would be much more difficult to come out in any of the countries surrounding Israel.

NS: I would be shot and hanged. There are radical anti-gay laws over there. It is a problem. Many gay Palestinians come to Israel because they cannot be gay at home.

JH: Since you won, have you had lots of men throw themselves at you?

NS: No… I don’t think the fact I have a title changes anything.

JH: Do you have a boyfriend at the moment?

NS: No, I don't.

JH: Is that by choice, or…?

NS: Always it is by choice. I need to find the right man, then you make time. My last long-term boyfriend was three years ago. I was with him for eighteen months.

JH: Well, why don’t you leave the Palestinians alone and invade my territories, Nathan?

(Laughter. Interview ends.)