I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.

Few people will shed any tears for the “historian” David Irving, jailed in Austria for three years yesterday, having been found guilty of Holocaust denial – a criminal offence under Austrian law. I certainly won’t.

But is it right that someone should be imprisoned for their opinion, regardless of how vile and abhorrent we might find it? Isn’t this the price of freedom of speech: that we have to tolerate the views of extremist, lying, Nazi-sympathising scum like Irving?

If freedom of speech means the right to publish cartoons that upset Muslims, it is also the right of idiots like Irving to publish his “research” arguing that the gas chambers of Auschwitz were a fallacy. (Although he has since revised his opinion of this, apparently. In the light of “new evidence”, he now accepts that they did exist after all. What a formidable researcher.)

Whilst I can understand why a country like Austria would be sensitive about its own part in the Nazi atrocities, it seems counter-productive to me to enforce this law. I hadn’t heard a thing about Irving since he lost a court case in 2000 to Deborah Lipstadt, who first accused him of Holocaust denial. Today he’s on the front page of virtually every newspaper in Britain, possibly Europe. Now he can claim martyrdom and will become a cause célèbre to every dunderhead on the far right.

I think Ms Lipstadt summed it up best: “He should have been met by the sound of one hand clapping. The one thing he deserves, he really deserves, is obscurity.”

I reserve the right to offend anyone I choose

And so it continues. Thousands of moderate Muslims took to the streets of London today to protest against those infamous cartoons. (Not that they’ve even been published in this country of course, at least not in their entirety. Our papers have claimed they did not to want to cause offence. But let’s face it: they were simply terrified of repercussions, which is tantamount to appeasement.)

Thankfully the march appears to have been peaceful, with approximately 4,000 people turning up to represent the views of moderate Muslims in this country. Not quite the 30,000 that the organisers hoped for, but at least the extremists seem to have stayed away. It’s been a bit chilly in London lately, so maybe they’ve decided to stay at home and burn some more Danish flags to keep themselves warm. At least we won’t be treated to the sight of banners calling for jihad in London. Not today, anyway.

Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn was there, talking about the need for mutual respect, etc. So, too, was Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather who opined that the cartoons were “a juvenile posturing exercise”. You are entitled to express that opinion, of course, Sarah. After all, that is your right. But even juvenile posturing exercises are not forbidden under British law. She then went on to say that: “Nothing was done to further the cause of liberal values or the freedom of speech – the publication of the cartoons was just plain racist.”

Two points. Firstly, Muslims are not a ‘race’ – it is a religion. Secondly, nobody is claiming (at least, to my knowledge) that this was ever intended to “further the cause of liberal values or freedom of speech” in any case. The point is, the publication of these pictures was an expression of freedom of speech which is protected by liberal values. The question is: why are you so keen to defend only this one faith from being offended? Especially when so many aspects of this faith (which isn’t alone in this respect, either) clash directly with the values that you, as a member of the Liberal Democrat party, are meant to embody. Why aren’t you leaping to the defence of all religious groups when they are affronted by something, as you obviously feel so strongly about it?

The BBC caused a commotion amongst some Christian groups last year when it broadcast Jerry Springer The Opera on national television. The show depicts Jesus in a nappy, has him describing himself as “a bit gay” and generally wound up a lot of Christians in much the same way that the Danish cartoons have upset Muslims. Fair enough, they have the right to be outraged. They also have the right to demonstrate outside BBC offices (which some of them did). But unless my memory fails me, there was a marked lack of Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs protesting with them. Maybe Corbyn and Teather were there, upholding the right of Christians not to have their faith mocked. I doubt it though.

The general response from a number of commentators and politicians to this issue has been disappointing. Our own government’s response was feeble, as was the Bush administration’s. The same was true when the fatwa was placed on Salman Rushdie’s head in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini – condemning someone to death for the ‘crime’ of writing a novel. There was a general air of apathy along the lines of “well, he shouldn’t have written something if he knew it was going to offend people”. Pathetic.

If we’re going to start addressing any personal behaviour that might offend religious beliefs then where do we start? Taking the Lord’s name in vain? Depicting Jesus in a nappy? Depicting Muhammad in any form? Working on the Sabbath (this would have to cover Sunday and Saturday to keep Christians and Jews happy)? Worshipping false idols? These are all forbidden according to religious texts. I drink alcohol, eat pork and have sex outside of marriage (often at the same time). Should I stop, lest I ‘offend’ somebody? It wouldn’t be a case of knowing where to start: where would we stop is the question.

We shouldn’t be appeasing or protecting any religious beliefs or convictions as a matter of public policy. In fact, we should be scrapping our own (Jesus protecting) ‘blasphemy’ law and certainly not opening a debate on the concept of widening it. God forbid!

Resisting fundamentalism

The ongoing uproar over the publishing of those cartoons is so much more than just another news story. Let’s face it: somebody, somewhere, is offended by something they have seen in the media every second of every day. What this story illustrates is the extent of the division between western, secular democracy which cherishes and upholds freedom of speech and expression, against that of unreconstructed Islam which is, in some extreme cases, prepared to kill to ensure words are not said and images not displayed that they find ‘offensive’. Unreconstructed Islam which cannot differentiate between state law and personal freedom and does not grasp the concept that the actions of a newspaper are not the responsibility or business of the government. So we get futile lobbying of the Danish embassy, an organised boycott of Danish goods and – oh my – the burning of the Danish flag. These, of course, were mild responses compared to the burning and looting of the Danish embassy in Beirut, and the attacks on similar buildings in Iran and Syria.

This is, in every sense, a battle between debate and dogma, freedom and doctrine, liberty and fascism. The papers that have reprinted those pictures are totally within their right to do so and defenders of the sanctity of freedom of the press should absolutely refuse to capitulate to the dogmatic thugs insisting otherwise. These freedoms are much more precious than some archaic belief system that forbids any representation of its main prophet. And that goes for religious fundamentalists of every persuasion, by the way: Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Hindu, whatever. The government is under no obligation to protect your faith from being affronted, nor should it ever feel any – once you start, where do you stop?

The irony is that the cartoons which whipped up the most anger weren’t even published in the first place. According to a piece in the Guardian on Saturday, a group of imams from Copenhagen, not satisfied with the response the story was getting in their own country (remember, they were originally published back in September), took the offending items on a ‘tour’ of the middle east to whip up fury. According to the article:

At this point a group of ultra-conservative Danish imams decided to take matters into their own hands, setting off on an ambitious tour of Saudi Arabia and Egypt with a dossier containing the inflammatory cartoons. 

According to Jyllands-Posten, the imams from the organisation Islamisk Trossamfund took three other mysteriously unsourced drawings as well, showing Muhammad with the face of a pig; a dog sodomising a praying Muslim; and Muhammad as a paedophile. “This was pure disinformation. We never published them,” Lund complained. But the campaign worked. Outwardly the row appeared to be calming down. But in Muslim cyber-chatrooms, on blogs, and across the internet, outrage was building fast.

I wonder how many of the people who took to the streets globally this weekend have actually seen these cartoons in their entirety. The depressing thing is that, as a body of satirical work, the cartoons were actually pretty poor. The most offensive thing about them to my mind is that they weren’t particularly funny in the first place. But then Danes are not famed for their sense of humour. In fact, as I said elsewhere, Danes aren’t famed for anything in particular apart from Carlsberg and Danepak. Oh, and Lego. That is, until now.

The sad fact is, most of the people that protested chose to be offended by something they probably hadn’t even seen with their own eyes. So they took to the streets of London, dressed as suicide bombers, adorning babies with I Love al-Qaida hats and carrying placards with such lovely sentiments as: “Massacre those who insult Islam”, “Butcher those who mock Islam”, “Europe you’ll come crawling when Mujahideen come roaring”, “Britain you will pay: 7/7 on its way”.

Meanwhile, papers in the Middle East routinely run ‘satirical’ cartoons that are blatantly anti-Semitic and anti-western. If you want an example, take a look here. An Iranian newspaper has now launched a competition to find the ‘best’ 12 cartoons about the Holocaust, as if there weren’t enough similarities already between Islamic extremists and Nazis.

Because that is what a lot of those protesters in London at the weekend reminded me of, and it’s absurd that the extremist elements were not challenged and arrested. If the BNP held a rally in London, with hundreds of people on the streets promising death to non-whites, while others dressed as Hitler holding placards saying “Kill all Jews” or “Holocaust now”, they wouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. And if we don’t tolerate this behaviour from white supremacists, we shouldn’t tolerate it from Islamofascists either.

Fortunately, those that took to the streets to preach hatred and incite murder of innocent people are still very much a minority within the Muslim faith and it was encouraging to see the chairman of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee openly condemn their actions. Even the idiot who dressed as the suicide bomber on Friday has now apologised. Apparently he “had not intended to cause offence.”

Ah yes, offence. Of course. Wasn’t that the abstract concept that kicked this whole issue off in the first place?