Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly in France, has published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. Whether the cartoons are good or not, whether they are amusing or not, is by the by. That’s not the point. The point is in the gesture of publishing them.

I’m glad that Charlie Hebdo did and would that more publishers and editors began fighting back, to make it clear that the democratic world is not going to give up its hard-won freedoms just because some people in the undemocratic world said so.

If we practice self-censorship, if we watch what we say, write, draw and publish because of fear of an adverse or even violent reaction, then we are taking ourselves right back to the time when we considered what we published or said in the context of fear of what our own rulers would do. The triggers to fear now come from without, but still they compromise and restrict our liberties.

I do not take the moral high ground here as a Maltese non-Muslim. I can’t. We Maltese are not truly European in this respect and have been, historically and geographically, on the margins of the democratic developments that forged present-day European attitudes towards freedom of expression and a liberal society. We have had democracy forced upon us. We did not work for it ourselves through centuries of intellectual debate and social provocations. Our battles were about food, not about freedom, because of the dire circumstances of subsistence. We still don’t quite know what to do with democracy or how it works. We think it is about votes in general elections, majority rule, and the functions of parliament. That’s how primitive our understanding is.

Talk to people in Malta, and ask them what they think about the Mohammed cartoons/Mohammed film situation and if they know what is happening at all, you will see that the most common response you get is that these things should be avoided – not because they cause trouble unnecessarily (though that, too) but because they cause offence and you mustn’t insult religious belief.

The freedom to insult and criticise other people’s religious beliefs is one of the most fundamental tenets of freedom of expression. When the ideas which underpin the concept of free expression and its relationship to personal liberty were being forged over the course of centuries, offence to and criticism of religious beliefs was what it was all about. What else could it have been about? When people were being cut into bits or burned at the stake for criticising some aspect of Catholicism, when Catholics were persecuted in Britain, there were no political parties and no political ideologies as we know them today. Religion was politics and politics was religion, just as it is today in the Islamic world.

The United States of America began as a refuge for Europeans escaping religious intolerance back home. Their religions, their sects and beliefs, were different and various, but they found common ground there and built it on the principles of freedom and individual liberty that came to be held sacred and inviolable. It might seem a contradiction in terms to use the example of people fleeing religious persecution and insult to defend our right to insult (though never to persecute) religious ideas. But it is not. These matters are intertwined, the different sides of the same coin: say and write what you like, but do absolutely nothing to force others to say and write what you like, against their will.

The Muslim fundamentalist threat of violence against anyone who criticises Islam or creates an image of the Prophet Mohammed is an immense threat to European and American freedoms, but we in Malta cannot climb up on our high horse because in our own country it is against the law to blaspheme against or insult the Catholic religion. Until that legislation is repealed, we are only in a position to speak out against the violence, but certainly not against the thinking that motivates it.

I find that many people confuse the two separate issues of ‘how disgraceful to say such a thing’ and ‘he/she should be stopped/arrested’. Fine, go ahead and think something is disgraceful and say so, or write about it. That’s what freedom of expression is. They are free to say it, and you are free to object to it. But it is a huge leap back into the past to say that somebody should be stopped from writing or saying things to which others object (lying about and slandering individuals is a different matter entirely) or subjected to criminal prosecution.

France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, has called Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons “a provocation”. He has given the order for more security at France’s diplomatic buildings in the Islamic world. You can understand his reasons for being cross, because the publication of those cartoons gives the French government so much more to do and to worry about, and can result in loss of French lives and trade. Is it worth it? Yes, it is. Millions – yes, millions – of Europeans (and those are just the Europeans) died or were killed over the course of the last few centuries, victims of the sort of beliefs we are looking at now. Our freedom today floats on a river of their blood. That freedom should be defended at any cost and all attempts at compromising it challenged.

Charlie Hebdo’s building in Paris was fire-bombed almost a year ago after the weekly published a caricature of Mohammed. The statement it makes, in refusing to be cowed by that firebomb into conforming to the undemocratic beliefs of fundamentalists, is not to be criticised. It is to be praised.