I have some questions to ask you about the paradox of being in two cultures at the same time - apart from being extremely difficult to define what one is, it can be schizophrenic at the least !!!

Being a Pakistani, of obvious mulsim extraction, but a committed atheist I am appalled by both the Western perspective of the East and by the East’s myopia of the West.

Without going into a lengthy discourse, the recent attacks in London were especially horrific for me (my Sister would have been on the Edgware road train, in the second carriage, at 8:50 had it not been for the fact that she had to be in early that morning for a meeting), however I find the reaction to the attacks perversely hypocritical. Every day scores of people are murdered in Iraq due to car bombs and the like, similarly there has been a steady tide of attacks in Pakistan/India/Afghanistan. Yet is there any ‘minute of silence’, lowering of flags….. for those non-western deaths ? As for the general response from muslim countries, while not publicised in the western press, seems lacking.

So the question is, how d you stride the divide between the two opposing cultural spheres.

P.S. I note that, true to character, the Brits have started to attack mosques…and in one case a Sikh temple.

It certainly doesn’t help when seemingly well-informed commentators like Rushdie also willingly forgo their own demonstrated knowledge of complex historical developments and insist on turning into the worst kind of native informant.

You fail to identify the myopia within yourself.

I note that, true to character, the Brits have started to attack mosques…and in one case a Sikh temple.

No. ‘The Brits’ have not done anything of the sort. A handful of individuals caused mischief. There has been no backlash of violence or attacks. The individuals were apprehended and charged. The police and politicians have been fastidious in their emphasis in preventing any such attack.

But in your analysis of ‘the Brits’ having a ‘true character’ which is irreducible and essentially nasty (because you allied it to the actions of an insignificant minority causing trouble) you show yourself to have more in common with the perpetrators of these acts than you might actually care to acknowledge, indeed, one wonders about what conclusions one might draw about Pakistan and its ‘true character’ in light of the backgrounds and history of the suicide-bombers using your own crude tools of analysis.

But that would mean falling into the same crass and myopic rhetoric you use, and I shall not do so, because I am not like that.

It certainly doesn’t help when seemingly well-informed commentators like Rushdie also willingly forgo their own demonstrated knowledge of complex historical developments and insist on turning into the worst kind of native informant.

Ah yes, that old canard of the ‘native informant’, so redolent of the thought police and the seething hatreds of Dostoevsky’s ‘The Devils’, so lazy, so dogmatic, so vicious of spirit and intellect, so totalitarian and Soviet.

Traitor. Cast him out. Native Informer. Banish him, burn him, tar him, feather him. Native Informant. Uppity Uncle Tom. Why? Because he contradicts me.

The traitorous parvenu. Destroy the traitor, the native informer, who says something I do not agree with, why should he do that other than to ‘inform’ on we ‘natives’?