by Martin Amis.

Knopf. 224 pages. $24.

BY MANDY TWADDELL
Special to the Journal

This collection of essays, stories, and reviews is recommended reading for anyone astonished by Radical Islam and its obsessive hatred toward the United States.

Why, one might ask, are we so despised, so vulnerable to attack, so out of sync with a part of the world that we depend upon? Our own obsession (oil), fed by billions of dollars plowed into Arab lands, could render a mutually satisfying merchant/consumer symbiosis, couldn’t it? What happened instead?

Martin Amis does not sugarcoat his answer.

America, he says, cannot grasp the Muslim world’s profound humiliation. They are a people who believe their God knows what they want and need. Yet they have “endured several centuries of Christian prosperity and global reach . . . while the Islamic nations were vanquished by a province (Israel) the size of New Jersey. . . .

“They lag behind the West and the Far East in every index of industrial

and manufacturing output, job creation, technology, literacy, life expectancy, human development, and intellectual vitality,” he writes. (A snapshot of this gnawing disparity: Present day Spain annually translates into Spanish more books than the entire Arab world has translated into Arabic in the last 1,100 years.)

Amis wonders how it feels to be humiliated by history as well as one’s God. In the story, “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” the protagonist explains his vengeance. “It comes from religious hurt, don’t you think? For centuries God has forsaken the believers, and rewarded the infidels. How do you explain his indifference?”

Like Christopher Hitchens, Amis describes the fundamentalists as self-righteous, self-pitying and self-hating. He suggests that religious belief fuels maniacal impulses. “To be clear;” he says, “the opposite of religious belief is not atheism, or secularism or humanism . . . it is independence of mind — that’s all.”

He reminds us that it’s wise to fear those who want to kill you. The liberal left, with its tolerance of tyranny, draws his contempt: He cheekily proposes that the West remain safe by capitulating and converting to Islam.

Amis has inherited a comedic appreciation of the absurd from his illustrious father, the British writer Kingsley Amis. He has fun with Tony Blair, Don Rumsfeld, and the accouterments we provide for our presidents when they travel abroad. The story about Saddam’s many doubles is priceless.

But for all his verbal spark and bite, or his hilarious description of Osama bin Laden, Amis’ emotional response to 9/11 is deeply felt. Anguish seeps through his sarcasm, until I too relived that horrific day, still perplexed on how to effectively confront Radical Islam. THE SECOND PLANE, September 11: Terror and Boredom,

jimandy111@cox.net