These cartoons

Images. Bradford youths, beside themselves with the rage of righteous ignorance, burning a copy of Satanic Verses.
Two Bradford girls, from “professional” families, in hijab, in my undergraduate class, explaining fully and calmly, without threatening or seeming threatened, why they would quite happily discuss Satanic Verses, but they would not themselves read it.
More recently, last year, a Muslim family sitting round our much enlarged dining table for tea. The old grandfather, an archetypal bearded patriarch visiting from Kashmir, had walked with me by the pond. We spoke with mutual respect in mutually unintelligible languages. At the meal a mother explained how her daughter had asked to be excused the visit because she was taking a GCSE the next day, but she, the mother, had said, “No, you must come, you can take GCSEs any time, but this experience you may never have again.”
I would fight for people’s right to be as they are and live as they want. But religion should be a private thing. Must be a private thing. It must have no place in decision-making, or government, or education (except as an object of study) or anywhere else, except as it privately informs the acts and decisions of individuals.
The attempt to shout down, cut down, the Danish cartoons that poked the mildest fun at bigoted, self-serving, ultra-reactionary religious totalitarians should be resisted, just as all that we call, admittedly a bit vaguely, fascism, should be resisted. And so should the cowardice of the international media in not showing what it is that the religious fascists are insisting that we should not be allowed to see. Here the BBC and the liberal press are in culpable dereliction of their duty in not printing the cartoons; not that they should do so as a yah-boo to Muslims, as the gutter press might; but in not doing so they allow the religious fascists to suggest that some inexcusable insult has been given by these images - whereas to publish them would demonstrate just how total and totalitarian is the censorship we are expected to endure at the say-so of a self-serving and bellicose minority within a religious minority.
There is nothing wrong with religion as a private pursuit. But immediately it is imposed upon others, others in the family as much as outside it, religion, being mythical, beyond reason, logic and morality, becomes perverse. (Religion beyond morality? Well, yes, I think any “Faith” that sanctions savagery, murder, torture, rape, genocide, is beneath or beyond morality. There is a derisory argument that morality is derived from religion, but clearly religions merely codify aspects of the contemporary morality, with much self-serving spin from the holy guys; who then make exceptions of themselves anyway, so that old men and women of all religions can abuse children, repress or kill young women, and murder their opponents, oh happy days.) So we should resist.
Who is we and what should we resist? We are the secular citizens of Britain, who subscribe to democracy, human rights... (I could go on for some time about what we subscribe to) and who find notions of race and religion irrelevant to the way the state and civic society should be ordered. And this We has nothing to do with colour or belief. Though he is Nigerian, I would put Wole Soyinka as one of the first among us, and the British Muslim undergraduates who discussed Satanic Verses with such calm, knowing that the convictions of others cannot harm one’s own.
And what we should resist is any attempt to dictate what we must not say or portray, by any person or group of any alien minority - in alien minorities I include a white public school educated religiosely post-democratic prime minister more loyal to the United States than his own country, and the lobby-fodder that support his totalitarian drift in Parliament, just as much as any non-English speaking, thought repressing, superstitious old fascist from the Punjab via Bradford, or young British murderer from Leeds.
And how should we resist? Through fearless championing of human rights, in thought and word, and a refusal to have our own rights curtailed by the outcry of religionists high on their own victimhood and their power to control and destroy what they see as proxies for their oppressors.
And, just to make it clear where I stand I say, without irony, respect to democracy, respect to elections, respect to Hamas. Respect to any democratic government of Israel that renounces terror.