WRITING yesterday of the decision by this newspaper and others not to publish those now-infamous cartoons poking fun at Islam, my colleague Ben Macintyre suggested that “this is not a matter of kowtowing to pressure”. With respect, I think it is.

Publishing the cartoons a few weeks ago, before the drawings had achieved notoriety, would have been defensible, he argues, but to do so now in the midst of all the fuss, would not. With respect, I disagree. In fact giving publicity to a few offensive but rather weak cartoons showed doubtful judgment while they were unknown; but publishing them now they are the centre of a huge storm is more defensible.

Many readers will be curious to see the cause of the storm. How else can we judge?

A little candour is called for here. Those protesting against publication are not really doing so because they themselves do not wish to see these pictures. They do not want you or me to see them either. They do not want anyone to see them. They do not want them to exist.

Devising a means by which access to the images will be granted only to those who positively seek it is unlikely to satisfy the objectors, and nor should it: their religion has instructed them to keep God’s world unpolluted by such pictures and the sentiment and opinion that accompany them. This they believe to be their God’s demand.

I’m afraid we really do have to decide whether the demand is reasonable.

I do not think it is. I am not a Muslim. Nor am I a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu.

Now it’s very easy to murmur “I am not a Muslim/Christian/Jew/Hindu” as though not being something was terribly inoffensive — a sin, at worst, of omission; a way of avoiding an argument — the suggestion, perhaps, that “your” religion may be “true for you” but, as for me, I’ll sit this one out. But let us not duck what that “I do not believe” really means. It means I do not believe that there is one God, Allah, or that Muhammad is His Prophet. It means I do not believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, or that no man cometh to the Father except by Him. I do not believe that the Jews are God’s Chosen People, or subject to any duties different from the rest of us. It means I do not believe any living creature will be reincarnated in another life.

In my opinion these views are profoundly mistaken, and those who subscribe to them are under a serious misapprehension on a most important matter. Not only are their views not true for me: they are not true for them. They are not true for anyone. They are wrong.

Cutting through the babble of well-meaning souls who like to speak of the “community” of belief among “people of faith”, this must also be what the Muslim is saying to the Christian, Jew or Hindu; or what the Christian must be saying to the Jew, Hindu or Muslim. These faiths make demands and assert truths that are not compatible with the demands and truths of other faiths. To assert one must be to deny the others. Nor is it possible to reply, as some nice Anglicans try to, that “my faith does not exclude yours”. But if other faiths do exclude their Anglicanism, then those Anglicans must exclude those faiths because they must regard it as wrong of them exclude them. There is no faith-based equivalent to the “different strokes for different folks” maxim, unless other folks subscribe to it too. They do not.

I have dealt with the logic of the position. People of faith and people of none cannot escape attaching themselves to claims that are inherently offensive — and at the deepest level — to other people.

But offence implicitly offered, and offence actually taken, are two different matters. On the whole Christians, for example, take offence less readily than Muslims. The case for treating them, in consequence, differently is obvious, but we should be wary of it. It means groups are allowed to be as thin-skinned as they wish: to dictate for themselves how delicately we must tread with them — to create, as it were, their own definition of respect and require us to observe it. Those who do this may not always realise that that they create serious buried resentments among those of fellow-citizens who are more broad-shouldered about the trading of insult.

Muslims are not alone in this. I really hate the way some Israelis and their apologists become angry and rude whenever the state of Israel is criticised; the interviewees who jump down their interviewer’s throat the moment they dislike a line of questioning about Palestine; the readers who write — themselves offensively — to allege anti-Semitism when none was felt or intended, or bark at you if you talk about their “wall” rather than “fence”.

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