Bernadette Devlin said dismissively of the press that “it is always looking for stuff to fill the space between its cartoons”. This week, that space has been largely filled with material describing the astonishing impact of a set of cartoons. Anger, outrage and protest continued across parts of Europe and the Middle East yesterday as the dispute over what was originally printed in a Danish newspaper escalated. There is a powerful sense that although the events surrounding this incident will dissipate, the broader theme that it has exposed — the divisions between Europe and the Islamic world — has become, alas, an established fixture.

This is reinforced by what has been an extraordinary week with an all too consistent theme. On Tuesday, ministers found that the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill had been ambushed in the House of Commons and they would be forced to accept changes put forward by the House of Lords. That this was — as we suggested — a blessing in disguise must have been evident to the most unthinking member of the Whips’ Office as the initial version of this Bill could have criminalised the reproduction of the Danish cartoons. Then, on Thursday, an acquittal of the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, on two charges of inciting racial hatred rested very uneasily next to accounts of the cartoon saga.

The sheer volume of noise should not be allowed to drown out the most significant tunes. The first is the much misunderstood role of the free press. It is telling that the reaction of protesters and politicians alike in much of the Islamic world has been to hold governments responsible for editorial decisions taken in media outlets. The assumption seems to be that the idea of a free press is an elegant sham, that democracies, just like dictatorships, involve controlled news, so nothing sees the black of print without an element of official sanction. It is an outlook that, if it cannot be changed, will, unfortunately, result in yet more conflict.

The second is the shining authority of the rule of law, both in its construction and its execution. A government in Britain that had embarked on a mistaken legislative course, in part with the objective of winning back electoral favour from a minority community, discovered that it had not only lost a vote but even more decisively forfeited an argument on “hatred”. Meanwhile, a jury rightly decided that its task was to look at the potentially explosive case involving Mr Griffin on its merits and not arrive at a verdict based on what they thought of him personally or his provocative opinions.

It has also been, finally, a week in which voices of sanity and calm have emerged, sometimes from unexpected locations. Among the heroes has been Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, who with a firm dignity made clear that while he disagrees with the sentiments implicit in cartoons published in his country, he will not apologise because a newspaper was at liberty to print them.

There have been others in the Middle East too, those linked with Hamas in Gaza, who sought to protect Christians from the mob and, especially Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s senior Shia cleric, who condemned the dangerous militants in Islam’s midst who had “projected a distorted and dark image of the faith of justice, love and brotherhood”. While words such as these can expressed by a man in such a position, the feared “clash of civilisations ” may still be avoidable.