Mark Steel on the whole west/muslim culture clash i guess you'd call it.

Mark Steel: It's no joke if you're on the receiving end
Nothing makes people cling tighter to their group than if they feel under attack
Published: 08 February 2006

What's the matter, can't we take a joke? That lad in the suicide bomber jacket was only having a laugh. What were people getting so over-sensitive about? Even if you didn't like his gesture, surely you agree with the principle that he should have the right to make it.

If we were clever, instead of arresting him, we'd have defused the situation by offering him a job modelling for a catalogue. He'd soon lose his ability to shock if it was in the winter wear section, with a caption: "Comfy and casual, the polyester twin-zip suicide jacket is fully adjustable, easy to wash and surprisingly cool to ease those inevitable sweaty moments! (This item isn't available on a weekly payment scheme and must be paid for in full before delivery)."

Instead, to the boundless glee of editors and phone-in show hosts, he turned out to be an ex-crack dealer on parole. All The Sun needs now for a perfect week is to reveal he's broken Chantelle's heart as Preston's gay lover, thus destroying his ambition to be leader of the Liberal Democrats.

But it isn't just The Sun denouncing Muslims for "threatening free speech". Almost everyone regarded as vaguely clever has appeared somewhere to confirm that free speech, however unpalatable, is the foundation of etc etc. I expect the Shipping Forecast has gone "Biscay, five rising to eight, a gale that, while I may not like it, I would die for its right to blow. Easterly."

But a debate about free speech is meaningless unless it relates to the society in which things are being spoken. When Goebbels commissioned cartoons of grotesque paedophile Jews, he was exercising free speech. So if you approach the matter as an abstract debating point, we should defend his right to do so. But that's obviously mad. Similarly, it wouldn't have helped much to advise Jews to draw their own cartoons of grotesque paedophile Nazis, saying "Then we'll all be laughing at each other, so isn't that lovely."

But you get the impression that if the academics discussing the matter now had been around back then, there'd have been an edition of The Moral Maze which began "Our first witness is a Miss Ann Frank. Now you've been complaining about some of the images that have appeared recently, but surely if you're not prepared to accept other people's viewpoints you've no right to be in the country."

Because speech leads to actions. The reason we no longer accept golliwogs and black and white minstrels and the joke of throwing bananas at black footballers is because their existence effects the status of black people in society. If it's legitimate to portray an entire race as sub-human idiots, they're more likely to be attacked, abused and made to feel utterly dreadful.

And yet the debates about the reaction to this Danish cartoon have almost all ignored the position of those who feel most threatened by it. Nothing makes people cling tighter to their social group than if that group feels under attack.

For example, although I come from Kent, I feel little compulsion to be Kentish. But if Canterbury was flattened by the most powerful armed force for harbouring weapons that turned out not to exist - and an army occupied the place and nicked the cathedral - and a heavily armed state bulldozed the West Bank of Maidstone - and anyone from Dartford to Margate was viewed with suspicion and hundreds were held in camps without trial - and the whole of the West screamed that Kent wasn't democratic but then we held an election and they screamed "No you're not allowed to vote for them, that proves you're all terrorists" - I'd be down with my brothers in the Folkestone ghetto, singing folk songs about the green fields of Swanley and kneeling five times a day to sip Shepherd Neames and pay homage to Wat Tyler.

And in those circumstances, a cartoon of Kentish heroes such as Christopher Marlowe or spin bowler Derek Underwood being buggéred by a dog would take on a different meaning than if someone drew them now.

In context, irrational ideas can make sense. Muhammad Ali followed a branch of Islam that believed white people were descended from devils that had been specially bred by an evil doctor, and that one day a giant spaceship would arrive to rescue the righteous black people. So on the face of it Ali was a nutcase. But a glance at the segregated society he was brought up in is enough to see that at the time this could seem perfectly logical. Such bizarre beliefs can only be countered if the basis for them is acknowledged.

Or maybe the whole episode will end peacefully when the lad with the suicide bomb jacket appears in court and says, "But in my defence your honour, it was Halal crack," and everyone gets the joke and has a good laugh.