There’s a transcript of a lecture given by the infamous Salman Rushdie going around the interweb today. It’s long but interesting, dealing with the western world and how it’s (not) coping with Islamic Facism. A snip from the end of the lecture:

But the point about the freeze-frame is to suggest that we don’t know the ending. That we live in a moment of enormous conflict and we don’t know the ending. And the ending will be determined by which side has the greater will. And you have to say that the will of Islamic radicalism, at the moment, is extremely powerful. The question is whether our will to defend ourselves against it—and I’m not talking about armies and invasions. I’m talking about how to defend the world and the culture that we value against people who despise all those things. Do we have the will to defend it? Because if we don’t, we will lose it.

That had me recalling my own discussion a couple of weeks ago with a young lady at a party, which I later blogged about.

[…] I began having a discussion with my friend Ed about Islamism and the need for westerners to begin standing up in defense of their culture, before it’s overrun and lost.

[…]

American culture, Americanism, was unique in the world when laid down by the founders over two hundred years ago. It has provided the framework for the most powerful, prosperous society of the modern age, and been the idea by which most other clasically liberal, modern societies have been formed. While occasionally tarnished, bruised and beaten down, it still exists as that “shining city on the hill”. We must protect it against all odds, at all costs, lest it be lost to history under a wave of encroaching illiberalism and, dare I say the word… barbarism. We face nothing less than a return to Dark Ages thought, and the death of true intellectualism.

The meme is spreading fast. Will people finally start listening in time to avoid disaster?