PUBLICITY STUNT, courageous act of defiance, or vile anti-Islamic smear? The mocking cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad originally published in Denmark started as a hard-edged joke and have since spread, erupting into the most serious cultural clash between Islamic religious beliefs and Western freedom of expression since Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.

In Britain, a series of contemporaneous but coincidental events have conspired to make this a defining moment for free speech in Britain. In London, an Islamic preacher is on trial for allegedly inciting racial hatred with his remarks about Jews and jihad. In Leeds, a jury failed to reach a verdict on two charges in the case of the leader of the British National Party accused of inciting hatred of Asians.

In perhaps the most bizarre irony, if Tony Blair had stayed to vote on Tuesday on the Religious Hatred Bill, the Danish cartoons would be illegal in this country. The single vote that protected the right to satirise religion in Britain is a measure of how close, and how confused, the issue of free speech has become.

Can speech still be free if it denigrates an entire section of the population? How do you measure and quantify incitement? How do you define satire? Is it enough that a few people should find a cartoon funny when millions find it deeply offensive?

In the miasma surrounding the issue, there are a few, clear standards. The first is that free speech, as I wrote here a few weeks ago, is an absolute in almost all instances, the safeguard of all other rights. The right to say only the right thing is not worth having, let alone fighting for.

The cartoon showing the Prophet wearing a bomb turban is not only offensive but remarkably unsubtle, badly drawn and not very funny. It is also unfair, implying that an entire world religion is terrorist, rather a few fanatical adherents. The sentiments are crass in the extreme. But to silence and repress those opinions, however repellent, risks undermining the principle itself, as does the imprisonment of the historian David Irving for his revolting opinions about the Holocaust.

That said, free speech must have limits in a free society. I am not free to encourage someone to harm someone else on any grounds, whether of race, religion or anything else. But the standard for proving incitement to hatred (one down from inciting physical violence) must be very high; in order to be punished for my words, surely it must be shown that I deliberately, knowingly and intentionally set out to foment hatred of another race. That appears to have been an issue that locked the jury in Leeds, and with which the London jury may now be wrestling.

There is a universal right to be wrong. The cartoons in this case seem to be demonstrably wrong; as wrong, in their way as Irving’s hoary Holocaust denials. But that is not enough to warrant censoring either the cartoonists or the historian.

Much depends on context. The demagogue who calls for attacks on other races in the public arena is prompting hateful action; the fulminating historian presenting crackpot reinterpretations of history is not. Similarly, when the cartoons were first published this was a defensible act; to publish them today, amid bomb threats, boycotts and armed gunmen, could be seen as inflammatory provocation. This is not a matter of kowtowing to pressure, nor, indeed, of respecting religious belief; it is a question of finding the crucial but shifting dividing line where free speech tips over into deliberate provocation, a line that changes with changing events.

The Bill to outlaw religious hatred was flawed. It is possible to insult, slander and denigrate a person; it is not possible to insult an idea. Religion is, above all, an idea, and a matter of choice, unlike the colour of one’s skin.

Flippant as it may sound, God, Allah, Jesus and the Prophet all have a sense of humour (thank God, Allah, etc), unlike too many of their followers. These religions have been around for too long to be sensitive to ridicule. They can take a joke. Cartoons published four months ago have suddenly been turned into an unnecessary battle, with both sides deliberately whipping up the furore, one side issuing furious death threats and demanding apologies and censorship, the other fuelling the flame by publishing the images in a way designed to stoke maximum anger. Free speech is essential, but not unrestricted when it foments crime; equally, demands for censorship, in the name of protecting religious sensibilities, are unacceptable.

Both sides should get some perspective. Outraged Muslims should reflect that this is not wholesale assault on religion; no mosques have been burnt; no Muslims killed. And defenders of free speech might temper their high-minded outrage with the reflection that these are 12 not very good cartoons by non-Muslims scoring fairly obvious points as offensively as possible. At least Satanic Verses had artistic merit worth defending. Like Irving’s opinions, these cartoons are neither interesting nor original; they deserved to be published, and then ignored.

Having looked at the cartoons, I do not think they meet the standard of inciting racial hatred. They are by definition concerned with religion, not race, and cannot therefore be racist. Some are horrible, most are silly and a few are anodyne. I have not seen or read anything that proves the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten deliberately sought to whip up anti-Muslim feeling by publishing the cartoons (although republishing them today, in a far more febrile atmosphere, might do just that).

I have no right to demand that my beliefs be treated with the same gravity and solemnity I accord them myself. But I do have the right to believe that anyone who pokes cruel fun on the grounds of religion is a fool, and anyone who deliberately repeats the insult, simply to offend, is motivated more by bias than freedom.

There is a right to draw and publish religiously offensive cartoons. We have the right not to find them remotely amusing.

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