What utterly contrasting pieces
The Christopher Hitchens piece is terrible
and the Martin Amis pieces wonderful

first Mr Hitchens
Hitchens' gloss that

As Martin Amis said in the essay that prompted Steyn’s contempt: “What is one to do with thoughts like these?” How does one respond, in other words, when an enemy challenges not just your cherished values but additionally forces you to examine the very assumptions that have heretofore seemed to underpin those values?

well i read the Amis articles and i'm all set to say that Amis didn't mean that he failed to understand that sometimes your intellectual first principles are challenged. I'd been thinking about the Amis quote all day and about the Declaration of Independence's take on its assumptions and first principles "We hold these truths to be self-evident" and about how "all men are created equal" and its definition of men - and how that assumption has been challenged and expanded to mean women, black men and black women etc. and how it is a basic strategy to test and challenge intellectual first principles.

except Hitchens quotes Amis only the quote isn't in the articles pointed to by possible noteworthy and Google couldn't find it either

Mr Hitchens talks about "one-way multiculturalism" but who exactly thinks that multiculturalism is a one way process except the far right. The white far right complain about the death of our racial and cultural purity and that they are doing all the compromising and likewise the Islamist fascists complain about the polution of Western values on the purity of Islam and as Martin Amis points out the West and America specifically as an evil satanic temptress or

As Bernard Lewis puts it in The Crisis of Islam

'This is what is meant by the term the Great Satan, applied to the United States by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Satan as depicted in the Qur'an is neither an imperialist nor an exploiter. He is a seducer, 'the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men' (Qur'an, CXIV, 4, 5).

I was thinking about this and so I thought i'd include a photo of my friend Rupa aka Josh and her blue hair. She is a Leicester girl of Asian decent. She is fluent in Gujarati and a "wild child". She is a masala of cultural memes.

Multiculturalism is a dance of memes.

The one anecdote I want to include is about my friend Firoz, a devout Muslim and a devout Liverpool FC supporter. The latter partly because when he first arrived in Britain aged 5 he stayed in Liverpool. He has shall we say traditional Islamic views on homosexuality. In our office/call center was Darren who is openly gay. Both of them had to negiotiate a social minefield. They had to get on. They had to co-operate. They had to be civil. They had to act like professionals. They both had to be tolerant. They both had to compromise. That to me is the reality of multiculturalism and diversity. (Incidently my liberalism does not lead me to the relativism some people suggest I should display. If Firoz had been openly rude, disrespectful and homophobic and offensive to Darren then it is not difficult for me to take sides. Darren's rights supersedes' Firoz's religious views. When occasionally Firoz and I discussed the matter we would joke and politely agree to disagree but I made my opinion as clear as I could. I would disagree with the proposition that liberalism means empty relativism. I do believe that my liberal idealogy is a superior idealogy. I do not believe that all idealogies, moral structures, memes, etc are equivilant.)

RE: Facing the Islamist Menace