LAST WEEK I devoted this space to a diatribe against George W. Bush, conjoined with a paean of praise for the American system and Alan Greenspan, the retiring Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. The purpose of the article was to discuss the genius of a nation whose economy, culture and spirit of public service could operate so successfully, despite — or perhaps because of — such doltishly incompetent leadership from its top politicians. To my astonishment, this article generated a huge response, largely because it was read out on the radio by Rush Limbaugh, the country’s most famous right-wing talk show host.

Within hours of publication I received nearly 500 e-mails from American readers. About a quarter of these emails were split between praise and rational disagreement. However, the vast majority — some 300 — were abusive to the point of obscenity (homo Arab ass-f*****, Commie Jew-boy, Nigger-lover and so on). What opened the sluices on this flood of electronic sewerage was neither the offensiveness nor the originality of my article. As several of my correspondents disparagingly noted, President Bush has lived quite comfortably with this kind of ridicule in the US media every day. And as for originality, most of my favourable observations about the American system were expressed much more eloquently 200 years ago by Alexis de Tocqueville. It seems, however, that an article in a foreign newspaper full of condescending derision for the US President touched a raw nerve in America’s conservative heartland — and that is why, with the Muslim world apparently in turmoil over some mediocre cartoons in a little-known Danish paper, I return to this subject.

My reaction to the outpouring of abuse was to reaffirm a longstanding prejudice: that “white trash” American ultra-conservatives were the only people on earth who could possibly rival Islamic fundamentalists in their paranoia, touchiness and lack of humour. I planned to respond to my detractors by writing a tongue-in-cheek apology for the offence I had caused by insulting the head of their state religion and underestimating His great distinctions and achievements. This would be styled on the formulaic, hypocritical apologies offered by European politicians to the Muslim community.

But as the cartoon saga has turned to tragedy, with people dying and embassies burning, satire and irony would now be out of place. What is more appropriate is a serious comparison between the Muslim and American fundamentalists’ intolerance of other people’s ideas. This comparison may seem far-fetched but it brings out three distinctions that are critical in managing relations between Islamic fundamentalism and the modern world.

The first, very obvious, distinction is between civility and legality, between comment or behaviour that is discourteous, inconsiderate or unpleasant and behaviour which is, or should be, unlawful. Despite the hypersensitivity of the Americans who showered me with linguistic ordure, nobody would dream of suggesting that insulting America and its President should be banned. These 300 right-wing nuts wanted me sacked for my ignorance; they wanted The Times used as toilet paper, but none of them would suggest that I should be legally prevented from saying that President Bush was a fool.

How different from the paranoid religiosity of the Muslim fundamentalists who insist that “insulting religion” should not be a question of taste or of judgment, but a subject for criminal law. Yet this obvious distinction between what is offensive and what should be illegal is deliberately ignored by the Blair Government, which wants to make insulting religion a criminal offence.

The second, and related, distinction is between verbal abuse and physical violence. Returning to my self-selected sample of nutty Americans, none of them threatened me with physical harm, or suggested that such harm might be my just desert. How different from the violence of the Muslim rent-a-crowds whose banners portray their enemies beheaded. Yet this obvious distinction between verbal abuse and physical violence is deliberately overlooked by British police, who have refused to prosecute Muslim demonstrators threatening their enemies with hideous violence. Meanwhile, British judges have sentenced Abu Hamza, convicted for inciting multiple murders, to just seven years. Presumably this means that religiously motivated murder is less serious in the eyes of our learned judges than such offences as drug-dealing or fraud.

This brings me to the third and most important distinction that Americans seem to understand much better than we in Europe. This is the distinction between religion and other beliefs. Why should religions be entitled to legal protection from “insults” and “attacks”? Would anyone suggest that communists and fascists or, for that matter, Tories and social democrats, should be protected from insults? Yet the first two of these movements were all-embracing secular religions and their believers, who numbered in the hundreds of millions, believed in them every bit as passionately as Christians, Jews and Muslims believe in their religions.

Far from commanding any special respect or protection from the State, religions must be exposed to relentless criticism, like all non-rational traditions and beliefs. Some religions will survive this contest between tradition and modernity, between reason and revelation, as Christianity, Judaism and Islam have done for centuries. Others, such as Marxism and Scientology, will fall by the wayside. In America, the Constitution, with its prohibition against the establishment of any state religion and its absolute defence of free speech, demands a robust competition between faith and reason and among the religions themselves. And in the end, as America’s surprising piety clearly shows, it is not just society but also religion that emerges stronger from the refiner’s fire of competition, criticism and even insult.

a.kaletsky@thetimes.co.uk

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone