Although the famous have come to his defence in the question of plagiarism or fair borrowing as historical research, will anyone defend Ian McEwan from Ziauddin Sardar’s charge in New Statesman that he, Martin Amis, and Salman Rushdie form a triumvirate of Blitcons?

Sardar, a writer and broadcaster who has been appointed as a commissioner of the U.K. Commission for Equality and Human Rights, says the three are “the vanguard of British literary neoconservatives.”

According to Sardar, the “Blitcon project is based on three one-dimensional conceits” — a faith in the absolute supremacy of American culture, the belief that Islam is the greatest threat to Western civilization, and that “American ideas of freedom and democracy are not only right, but should be imposed on the rest of the world.”

After examining various bits of writing from each man, Sardar concludes:

The real world is not a fiction. The ideology of mass murder has a history and a context in all its perversity and evil. But the wild imaginings of the Blitcons are not an appropriate guide to the eradication of this horror. Turned to this end, the manipulative power of literary imagination is nothing but spin. And such spin is simply hatred answering, mirroring and matching hatred.

(Kind of makes the whole plagiarism controversy look like a walk in the park….)

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Click here for the full article in New Statesman