Thinking think tank?

I was wittering on yesterday about people in ivory castle think tanks. Looking around for others of similar irritation to me, I came across this snippet. "The Institute of Ideas hosts a discussion at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 'the right to be offensive'. The debate will ask whether the proposed Racial and Religious Hatred Bill amounts to "a new kind of thought crime".
Obviously, my attention was drawn to ‘right to be offensive’ as this was right up my street. Good start but it was mainly concerned with racial aspects. I think the Institute of Ideas is a survivor of the group that was prosecuted for libel – and lost – when they accused ITN of faking pictures of Serbs/Bosnians in what they said was a concentration camp. So, they know what they are talking about when it comes to offensive.
I had a wander around their site so see if they had any other bright ideas and came across something about another of today’s ongoing saga. This is some of what they had to say about Multiculturalism.
“Part of the problem, I think, is a confusion between two different meanings of multiculturalism: what I would call multiculturalism as an ideology and multiculturalism as a lived experience. When most people say they think multiculturalism is good, what they mean is the experience of living in a society that is less insular, less homogenous, more vibrant, more cosmopolitan than before. Those who advocate multiculturalism as an ideology however are talking about something different.
Multiculturalism, they argue, requires the public recognition and the public affirmation of cultural differences, and the argument goes something like this: we live in a world where there are deep-seated conflicts between cultures embodying different values; different peoples and different cultures have different beliefs, different values and different lifestyles, many of which are incommensurate but all of which are equally valid in their own context. And in such a world social justice demands that individuals are treated as equal, but also that cultures are treated as equal, and indeed that cultural differences become institutionalised in the public sphere. The American scholar Iris Young put this quite well: groups, she says, cannot be socially equal unless their specific experience, culture and social contributions are publicly affirmed and recognised.”
So, I came to mock Ideas Institute, and whilst I do not praise them, they have some ideas that interest(d me).