In October 1979, Labour supporters marched on the Valletta offices of The Times, ransacked them, and then set fire to the place on the grounds that The Times printed material offensive to the Labour Party. Those protestors, and the politicians who instigated them and then defended them, were following exactly the same line of reasoning and behaviour as the Muslims who are currently burning buildings and calling for punishment for those who published the infamous cartoons. I make this parallel because it is one that we can understand, and also because it is a good illustration of the fact that, in violent outbursts such as these, the common factor is not religion or even politics, but crass ignorance and an unsophisticated understanding of democracy and human rights.

Those of us who are equivocating now by saying that the Muslims protestors are wrong to resort to violence, but that the publication of the cartoons was wrong and unnecessarily provocative, should ask themselves: “Was The Times wrong to criticise and satirise the Labour Party at a time when it knew that the Labour Party was undemocratic and intolerant of criticism, and when it knew that there was a strong likelihood that the building would be attacked?” If your answer is “No, The Times was not wrong; it was fully within its rights. It was the Labour protestors who were in the wrong, to burn the building down,” then you have to apply the same reasoning to your views on the current chaos. In a democracy, religions do not – or rather, should not – have a status more special than that of political parties, which allows them to suppress the publication of views and cartoons they deem offensive. Where would we be headed if we were to start down that road?

The Times was not the only organisation to be attacked and ransacked by Labour supporters who had felt themselves offended. There were also the Nationalist Party headquarters, the home of the Leader of the Opposition, various Nationalist Party Clubs (including one in which a man was shot dead), the Law Courts, and the Archbishop’s Curia. Labour supporters felt themselves offended too, by mass gatherings of people who did not agree with them, so they attacked them as well. It was not all Labour supporters who did this; it was some of them, but they tarred their entire party with shame. And so it is with the Muslim protestors, even those who are demonstrating quietly and without calling for the murder of the cartoonist or burning buildings. Their shame is in their failure to understand that they have no right to tell Europeans, for whom democracy and freedom of speech have been hard won in political and ideological battles that have soaked the past 500 years in blood, how to live their lives or run their countries. When the protests come from Muslims who live and work in Europe, they are even more shocking. They show a barely comprehensible lack of knowledge of the fundamental tenet of European democracy: that we are all equal before the law, and nobody can seek special status on grounds of religion or politics. The laws which deal with freedom of expression in a European State cover all those people who live and work within its borders, and equally so. There cannot be one law for Muslims and another law for Christians, without undoing all that has been won, painfully and gradually, from the Renaissance to the present day.

Given the history of the Labour Party in Malta, I was unsurprised that it was a Labour politician who wrote to a newspaper to tick off the publishers of the cartoons for offending Muslims. Gavin Gulia, writing in The Malta Independent to display profound ignorance about Christianity and democracy in the Christian world, claimed that Mohammed is as sacred to the Muslims as “Jesus and Our Lady are to Christians.” Perhaps somebody should rush to let him know that ‘Our Lady’, as he so endearingly describes her in the terminology of his duttrina classes, is only that sacred to Catholics, and not to other Christians. He should also get out more, and discover that Christianity and tolerance are compatible and not mutually exclusive, unless you are in a Gozo village or in the American Bible Belt. Speak for yourself, Mr Gulia, but I have absolutely no inclination to burn down the buildings of those who parody Jesus Christ, nor do I even get upset about the parody. I can’t expect the rest of the world to either share my beliefs or shut up about theirs.

Dr Gulia wrote: “The fact that in the past couple of years we in the West have developed the habit of testing our fundamental rights and freedoms to the very limit of acceptance, not without legal consequences, does not give us a licence to impose ourselves on others who do not share our values. The assumption that the ‘right’ to impose our set of freedoms on other cultures and mentalities is an exercise in flawed thinking.” I am afraid that the flawed thinking is on Dr Gulia’s part. He seems to see nothing odd in his assertion that, while Christian Europeans have no ‘right’ to ‘impose our set of freedoms on other cultures and mentalities’, those other cultures and mentalities have the right to impose theirs on us, in our own country, under our own laws. Had Dr Gulia been writing about cultural colonialism, in which Christian democrats from the west go to the Middle East to agitate against the regimes there, and to tell the people who live there how wrong and stupid they are, perhaps then I might agree with him. Yet he is writing about non-Muslim Europeans in their own countries where only their laws are valid. If Muslims wish to live in Denmark, then they have to respect the laws of Denmark. If Muslims wish to live in Britain, then they have to respect British law. Those laws guarantee freedom of expression for all, which is why nobody has stopped them marching through the streets shouting abuse and carrying placards which praise the 11 September bombers as magnificent heroes, and which call for the destruction of the western civilisation in which they are now living with freedom after escaping the oppression and poverty of their own Islamic cultures.

Christopher Hitchins, the British writer and commentator, summed it all up for me when he said: “There isn’t an inch to give, nothing to negotiate and no concessions to offer. Those of us who believe in enlightenment and free speech also have unalterable principles which we will not give up. We have to listen all the time to piratical-looking mullahs calling our Jewish friends pigs and demanding the censorship of The Satanic Verses and we find this fantastically insulting, but we don’t behave like babies. They are making a puerile spectacle of themselves. We should say, how dare you behave in this way? They can put themselves under laws and taboos if they wish, but it is nothing to do with me or with anybody else. They are completely out of order.” The essential failure of many – Muslims and also Christian Europeans – is that they appear to believe that Muslims should be permitted to live by Muslim laws, rather than by the laws of the country in which they happen to be.

The Aga Khan, Imam of the Ismaili Muslims, gave an interview to The Sunday Telegraph some months ago in which he made a comment that can be used as an accurate reflection on the reaction to the cartoons. He said: “I see it as a clash of ignorance rather than a clash of civilisations. There’s a remarkable degree of ignorance between the civilisations – and please note that I put this in the plural – of the Islamic world and the civilisations of the non-Islamic world. I think that we Muslims as part of human history have been amazingly absent from the definition of an educated person in Judeo-Christian society... An educated person in the 21st century in terms of basic knowledge of human society has got to have basic knowledge of the Islamic world. I’m not talking about religion; I’m talking about human society and civilisation. It’s not a religious issue.” The reverse is also true: that an educated person in the Islamic world has to have a good understanding of Judeo-Christian society. The key is not religion but education, particularly education in the fact – and some Maltese apparently need this instruction, too – that you cannot take those parts of democracy that you like and leave the others. Freedom of speech is not a box of chocolates, in which you can pick and choose.

Some commentators, including Maltese politicians, are obviously confused as to the difference between the right to publish the cartoons and whether it was right to do so. The first is a matter of law; the second a matter of taste. There is a gulf between them, because the law does not get involved in good taste, but it does get involved in freedom of expression. To explain this with a banal analogy, I have the right to go to a wedding in a bikini, and that right is guaranteed by the law, but I would be wrong to do so, because it would be most ill-advised and in very poor taste. The taste or otherwise of publishing those cartoons can be debated until the cows come home, but the right of the newspaper to do so is indisputable. God forbid that any government should undo the achievements of our European forebears by passing legislation that allows its citizens to satirise one religion but not another, or no religion at all.

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Sandi Toksvig, a Dane who is a writer and broadcaster in Britain, has written about the debacle: “Depicting Mohammed is against Islamic law, but that is not the law of the land in Denmark... The prime minister has refused to censor Jyllands-Posten” – the newspaper that first published the cartoons – “because the Danish government does not have the power to tell its people what they may or may not print. Now we find ourselves in the bizarre situation in which mobs threaten Danish businesses across the globe, but few news outlets show the cartoons that started it in case they cause offence. Censorship is here.”

She is right. When European editors and politicians say that it was a bad idea to publish the cartoons, and that it would not be wise to reprint them in their own newspapers or countries “because they are gratuitously offensive”, you can hear what they really mean but cannot say: that the cartoons should not be published because of the fearsome reactions they will provoke among Muslims in their own countries, and because these editors don’t want to live under threat of death at Muslim hands. One of those who re-printed the cartoons has suffered reprisals of a very different but even uglier sort. Serge Faubert, as editor of the national newspaper France Soir, carried the cartoons with an editorial that included the comment: “Enough lessons from these reactionary bigots! Just because the Koran bans images of Mohammed doesn’t mean non-Muslims have to submit to the same strictures.” The owner of France Soir, a man who has business interests in the Middle East, sacked him. He said it was done to show “a strong sign of respect for the beliefs and intimate convictions of every individual,” but the cynics say it was done to protect his interests in Muslim lands. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French Interior Minister, defended France Soir’s decision to print the cartoons, and was dismayed at the sacking. He said: “We must defend freedom of expression and if I had to choose, I would prefer to have an excess of caricature over an excess of censure. There is no reason to make exception for one religion over another.”

To this has freedom of expression been reduced in Europe: to self-censorship by news organisations that fear the violence reaction of renegade Muslims. What they should do, of course, is band together and remind these people that they are living in a democracy now, and they have to abide by the rules. The German newspaper Die Welt also printed the cartoons, and commented editorially: “There is no right to be shielded from satire in the west.” Two Italian newspapers slapped the cartoons on the front page with editorials in defence of free speech. “This is about accepting or refusing the principle that it is possible to laugh at, or even just criticise, a mentality, a religion, a way of understanding spirituality,” wrote Vittorio Feltri, editor of Libero. “Publishing the cartoons is not a challenge. It is not a provocation. It is claiming our freedom to do so,” wrote Gianluigi Paragone in La Padania.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch politician who received death threats after writing a film that is critical of Islam, and which cost film-maker Theo van Gogh his life, called on more media to publish the cartoons. “This is Europe and if we have a thought, we can express it,” she told BBC radio. It takes somebody from Somalia to remind us how precious, and how very hard won, that freedom is.

And now some ill-advised or even cowardly European politicians would have freedom of expression held hostage by violent Muslim renegades who are not even representative of their religion. Asghar Bukhari, the chairman of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee in Britain, told the BBC News that the police should have stopped the demonstrations because protestors were advocating violence. “The placards and chants were disgraceful and disgusting,” he said. “I condemn them without reservation. These people are even less representative of Muslims than the British National Party” – an extreme fascist grouping – “is representative of British people.” The police did not stop the demonstrations because freedom of expression is fiercely upheld in Britain. Oblivious to the irony, the protestors were using that freedom to call for others to be silenced.

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The Vatican – well, it would, wouldn’t it? – deplored the violence but claimed that certain forms of criticism are “unacceptable provocation.” It said: “The right to freedom of thought and expression cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers.” We can discount the opinions of the Vatican on this matter, though, given its long history of religious censorship, its attempts to suppress any publication deemed offensive to Catholicism, and its lengthy index of banned books. It is precisely because Malta lived until very recently under the unacceptable rigours of religious censorship, with the government acting as bridesmaid to the Vatican, that so many Maltese cannot yet understand that, in the free world, no government and no church has the right to tell people what they may or may not print or read, or what films they are allowed to watch, unless it is within the narrow strictures of the libel laws. Twenty-five years ago, the Catholic Church felt it had the right to tell us not to read the novel The Thorn Birds, nor watch the television series it spawned, because it featured a cardinal who had an affair – an affair with a woman, I hasten to add, and not with a man or with a 10-year-old boy. Now, it wouldn’t dare do anything like that, realising that it would be laughed out of town. We shouldn’t be surprised at the religious oppression to which Muslims willingly subject themselves, even to the point of embracing it, because we were there too, once. State-guaranteed freedom of speech protects the individual against the excesses of religions which try to shore up their power and maintain their control over society. That is how we eventually shook off the oppression of the Catholic Church in Malta, which sought to interfere in every corner of our lives, and it is also how we shook off the yoke of a political party that thought the best way to deal with those who disagree with you is to burn down their buildings and beat them into submission.