IF YOU WERE to hold one of those notorious Danish-style competitions, to solicit, say, the most ironic slogan on a placard at a demonstration, last week’s legend “Freedom of Expression Go To Hell”, would be hard to beat. It would have made more sense if the placard had had the words covered up, so only the waver knew what was written on it. Sense, of course, wasn’t in it.

Many of the placards were more unpleasant; those who insulted Islam should be variously slaughtered, butchered, beheaded or — less imaginatively — simply killed. Then there were the rather vainglorious invocations of the death and destruction heading towards the lands of the infidel cartoon-publishers. The Holocaust, a new 9/11, a new 7/7 and the Mujahidin were all “on their way”. Most of the placards were, apparently, scrawled by the same industrious burka-clad lady, called away from her normal daily routines by the demands of her own personal jihad.

As intended, it drove many of us mad. I would very much like to have taken Omar Khayam of Bedford’s imitation suicide belt, rolled it up tightly and performed an al fresco sigmoidoscopy upon him. Like many Londoners, I know people maimed in the Tube bombings, and I would advise Mr Khayam not to repeat the trick any time soon.

Now the Prime Minister’s office seems to have joined some MPs and the Tory front bench in demanding that the police arrest the placard-wielders and charge them with unspecified offences. Throw the book at them. Make it clear there’s a line you can’t step over. And so on.

It’s another red herring, in a sea full of scarlet fish. The police may well know what everyone else keeps forgetting, which is the near-impossibility of getting modern juries to convict people for speech-crimes such as incitement. Nick Griffin, a man with a neo-Nazi past and a racist present? He walks free. The sister of one of the two Tel Aviv suicide bombers, who looked to me as if she was egging him on? She walks free. The Government itself has predicted that the amendments to its incitement to religious hatred Bill make it most improbable that anyone would be convicted under its provisions. We still await the Abu Hamza verdict.

What would we prosecute the protesters for? Their words were grotesquely offensive, but didn’t actually incite anyone to do anything to anybody specific. Not like the perfectly legal “Hang Nelson Mandela” posters that certain members of the Federation of Conservative Students used to bait lefties with in the early 1980s. Mr Khayam, with one eye doubtless on his legal situation, argued that he just went along to attend a protest, and this was a good way of making a point.

“Did I say, ‘Kill Jews?’ No. Did I have racist signs on me? No. So why this reaction?” Who knows?

Omar was also, I think, having a great time — for this is springtime for the bongo-brains. A vast row about offence, liberty and blasphemy, which seeks to polarise opinion and send people out into their squares and plazas huzza-ing for confrontation. It’s a clash of civilisations and it’s time to choose yours. What’s it to be — God or Freedom?

There’s so much to annoy. Take the constant false parallel between representing Jesus and representing Muhammad. We don’t mind, say unthinking seculo-Christians (to whom images of Jesus are ever-present), so why should you? Or the other side’s complaint that anti-Semitism is strictly verboten by the West, but Islamophobia is practically encouraged. Well, if there were 1.6 billion Jews and they were to take action against every country that permitted grotesque anti-Semitic imagery to be published, then there wouldn’t be an Iranian or Syrian embassy left untorched anywhere. Last August I found a copy of The International Jew complete with a cover graphic depicting a chap with a huge hooter and evil eyes — on casual sale in the shop front display at Brunei international airport. Perhaps I should have burnt the place down.

Who benefits from all this? Well, I wouldn’t give much for your chances of surviving if you tried to storm the Syrian Interior Ministry, but somehow demonstrators got through to the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus. And quite a few Syrians were picked up after the Danish Embassy in Beirut went up in flames. The slow burn on the story suggests certain governments and organisations using a confected outrage to mobilise particular strands of public opinion. It re-emphasises the malign relationship between tyrannies and parts of political Islamism.

Then there are the people for whom the appearance on the streets of the Omars is a vindication of their constant prophecies of doom. We told you (they say) that these people were different, that innate in their culture and their very religion are elements that mean that there cannot be a co-existence. Unique among all the immigrants who have come to our lands over all the years, they cannot live in peace with us.

I don’t know Danish politics very well, but I do know that an anti-immigrant strand has taken hold there in recent years, that Danish citizenship laws are some of the most discriminatory in Western Europe, and I would guess that this right-wing newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, has something invested in the idea that the cultures might be unassimilable.

Certainly it was being mischievous. It was interesting to discover yesterday that in 2003 the same paper refused to print some cartoons featuring Jesus, on the basis that (according to the editor): “I don’t think Jyllands-Posten’s readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact, I think that they will provoke an outcry. Therefore, I will not use them.”

So this present row was, fairly obviously, provoked in the expectation of a reaction, and that — this time — the outcry was tolerable to the newspaper.

I believe in civility and sometimes in restraint. Even so, there are freedoms and values that I wish my society and country to defend. It was right to publish and sell The Satanic Verses, and one day we will almost certainly be called upon to defend a play, probably written by a Muslim, that features the Prophet and that raises questions about belief. The impulse that created The Grand Inquisitor, currently being performed in London, will have an Islamic equivalent, and the row will be huge. When that happens there will be a lot of explaining and listening to do.

We can all get through it, if we’re prepared to avoid switching to a default mode that declares that they’re bad and we’re good. I think democracy, liberty and Islam can coexist. I think good manners and civility can be a part of “Western civilisation”. Look at the apologies by the Danish Government for any offence offered to Muslims. Look at the condemnation of Omar and the barmy brigade by the Muslim Council of Britain.

In his book about British Second World War traitors Sean Murphy, the author, recounts the words of a convicted Waffen SS volunteer, Benson Railton Freeman. Sentenced to ten years’ jail for treachery, Freeman told his lawyer: “This just shows how rotten this democracy is. The Germans would have had the honesty to shoot me.”

I love his disappointment.

Read David Aaronovitch’s blog: http://timesonline.typepad.com/david_aaronovitch

Times Recommends

• Treat Africans as part of the human jigsaw
• Too bitter a pill for me to swallow
• This Bill is a panic measure in a tarnished age