Congratulations on such a powerful idea. (Could you please respond–if you do–to my email addres. Thank you! Jane

“Negating difference” is not so much imperialist evil, as the way forward for friendliness without this dysfunctional obession with painful history over which the majority of the Western world agrees, in which hugely diverse people live. If we are not “different”, we are friends; maintaining and romanticising “difference” is the problem.

The “other”, as a critical point, equally applies to non Western identity relating to the West.

Get past the fancy rhetoric of Sealy’s post, and its essentially just pointless complaining like the black protestor in the Houses of Parliament, embarrasing Blair and the Queen. Yes, slavery was wrong. Yes, we all know that. No, it does not directly concern the Queen, Blair, Brown, or anyone alive today. And the fact is, a resentful ghetto attitude should be identified for the problem it is. UK society is actually remarkably tolerant and welcoming, and Sealy’s evident professional success testifies to that. Perhaps he should be helping people to others to do the same, instead of inflamming their resentments and implcitly maintaining their own disadvantage by this insistence on and affirmation of “difference”.

Its about time polemic like this is examined more closely for what, actually, it rests on, and what useful value it has. 200 years ago was a long time ago, and the way forward is affirming commonality not difference, integration not race or any other kind of tribalism.

2007 is a new world where this tired and intellectually weak insistence on “cultural roots” has to be consigned to the past as we relate as friends in the present. Almost everything Sealy says is contrary to that - and he appears, while I don’t want to start being personal - to have a successful personal career in what is, arguably, the professional sector of race/culture relations.

However, I will re-state the essence of what I said regardless, in a similarly restrained way:

What I said is not “my” interpretation - its a comment about current politics and the heinous seriousness of Islamic terrorism, which is considerably more important than personal stories about ‘artistic freedom’ - an “intellectual context” which I understand perfectly and of which I am perfectly aware.

Remarks like “You are as culpable as the soldiers pissing on a physically and psychologically abused human being” are highly offensive, inflammatory, and politically ridiculous - its just biassed emotion. I could respond with similar remarks about terrorism, and how Richard is ideologically complicit with the murder of thousands of innocent people. I could note that 9/11 preceded Iraq, that Islamist hostilities have existed for decades, that Iraq is just a convenient excuse. I have more “compassion” concerning the atrocity of 9/11 and, indeed, that perpetrated on hundreds of thousands by Saddam Hussein - now gone.

Dear editor: if you wish to conduct a sensible, quality debate, don’t include biassed invective with a personalised sneering tone, presenting subjects like this in such a facile and emotive fashion - or block people from responding to such nonsense.

However, to re state my essential point: this is not a personal soapbox on wider and complex politics. Its a blog about the ‘image’, and I commented specifically, logically and pertinently on the security services response to the art project. Denying or blocking the mention of Islamist propaganda implicitly denies its factual basis; I could, for example, provide examples of the widespread hatred seen in the Middle East - Jews are pigs, Christians are monkeys, the infidel is corrupt, etc. Excuse me for not having a social workers attitude to this - but if someone hates and wants to murder me on the basis of a religious creed, I’m kind of, you know, opposed to it.

If you don’t post this, I conclude you are 1) only interested in a massively biassed polemic, 2) one that includes sneering condescension if it supports it, and 3) that allows for divergent stuff obscuring the more simple points.

The art project was under suspicion for Islamist/terrorist propaganda. Mistaken, apparently, but understandable and legitimate.

That is essentially all I said, and my support for the security services should not be treated with this censorship, while allowing rather abusive responses.

I repeat: the problem is not that the security services acted, but that they acted in response to this real threat: the threat is the problem, not the efforts to prevent it. I find the reluctance to condemn terrorism, which is implicit in this blog, an alarming and rather despicable trend.

As for Richard: you are neither “compassionate”, nor informed, nor morally superior as you like to affect, nor worth responding to when you are full of emotive, divergent, shotgun stuff that’s your problem, not mine.

I didn’t “shout” Islamist propaganda I stated it factually, correctly, intelligently and pertinently; I repeat what I said as it applies to the art project in question, and suggest you respond to what I actually said if you wish to have any meaningful debate here, instead of using the blog for a personal soapbox. What’s counter-productive is your rather arrogant attitude.

Following on from Bill Thompson’s 13th April blog, entitled `The Meaning of “You” vs “Us”’, Mark also underlines the possible re-entrenchment, implicit in the distance between the two pronouns, between the mainstream media and alternative positions within what Time describes as `the new digital democracy’.

Mark’s reference to his own financial difficulties as an independent journalist/podcaster (`I can barely pay my rent next month’) invites his readers to level the accusation of parasitism at media corporations, which increasingly rely on free content supplied by independent bloggers, photographers, and video-makers, the recent Virginia Tech massacre being an example still vivid in our memories.

For Mark, corporate mediation blog content and other internet media exerts a pernicious effect by simulating a climate of representative choice while, in reality, reinforcing corporate agenda. The latter filter out the urgent stories of very real inequality and injustice reported on independently by citizen journalists around the world.

But Marks’s conclusion is not a pessimistic one. Echoing Pedro Meyer’s faith in the democratic power of search engines (openDemocracy.net podcast, 20th April, above), he looks to the `youngest internet users’ in the belief that they are more critical in actively seeking out sources of information.