Mick Hartley

An editorial in Der Spiegel compares the robust response of intellectuals in Germany to the Rushdie affair with the current pusillanimous reaction to the Motoons. Since no German publisher had the courage to publish The Satanic Verses, a group of authors led by Gunter Grass founded a publishing house, Artikel 19, named after the paragraph in the UN Declaration of Human Rights that guarantees freedom of expression, specifically for that purpose. In the end dozens of publishing houses, journalists, politicians, authors, and leading members of German society joined together in what Der Spiegel describe as "the broadest coalition that had ever been formed in postwar German history".

Now Grass can't wait to express his understanding of the hurt feelings of offended Muslims everywhere. The violent protests and deaths that followed the publication of the cartoons (or, more accurately, that followed the tour of the Middle East by the Danish imams whipping up a storm with the addition of new cartoons deliberately designed to be as offensive as possible) he described as "a fundamentalist response to a fundamentalist act" – as though the cartoons and the death threats were morally equivalent – and stated that, "We have lost the right to seek protection under the umbrella of freedom of expression". Fritz Kuhn, of the German Green Party, compared the cartoons to anti-Jewish caricatures of the Nazi era.

In Britain it's a similar story, though it's as well to remember that even with as seemingly a clear-cut case as the Satanic Verses, the response of left-leaning intellectuals here was by no means unanimously supportive of free speech. In a sign of things to come, John Berger and John le Carre, for instance, both went out of their way to criticise Rushdie. No doubt had the term been coined then they'd have accused him of Islamophobia.

Of course it's easy to see why people like Gunter Grass are able to justify their change of tune. Rushdie is an internationally renowned author, and, hard though many tried to argue it, the charge that he'd deliberately set out to offend Muslim sensibilities was never credible. He was as astonished by the fatwa as everyone else. With the Motoons, well, we're dealing with a generally less respected form of art which has as one of its main aims the deflation of pomposity, the home truth: in a word, giving offense. Plus Jyllands-Posten only commissioned the cartoons when they became aware of a general reluctance to depict Mohammed (for a children's book, in fact) and wanted to test the water, as it were. So it's easy to portray their publication as a gratuitously offensive action.

It wasn't gratuitously offensive though: it was doing just what cartoons are supposed to do: it was stating the case for the right to give offense in the most eloquent way. The sight of Muslims violently objecting to the portrayal of Muslims as violent is as clear a justification as you could want. And can we abandon – please? – the frequent sad observation that the Motoons were badly done, and childish, and pathetic, but OK I suppose we have to defend them because of free speech but really there are much more worthwhile causes. In fact the most famous one, Kurt Westergaard's Mohammed with a bomb for a turban, is a brilliant piece of cartoon art, which says what it wants to say with a wonderful economy. It's a classic – which is why some idiot smashed into his house with an axe the other week. It hurts.

The claim of many Muslims that they're victims  – of the West, of the Jews, of the US, of Christians, of the Crusaders - is central to the appeal of Islamists. Any jihad-recruiting group will start of by appealing to Muslim grievances. You could argue – as Carlin Romano was perhaps trying to do in otherwise over-the-top piece here – that the determined resistance by Turkey to any acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide has much to do with the fact that the first genocide of modern times was of Christians by Muslims, and this sorry fact somewhat dramatically undermines the universal story of Muslims-as-victims that drives the Muslim world.

So the Motoons and our reaction to them is a crucial test of our commitment to free expression against those who insist on being offended, and who seem unable to cope with the state of being offended short of violence once they've managed to get themselves offended. As Der Spiegel point out, and as Ophelia Benson argues here, we're not, at the moment, doing too well.