The Danish cartoons controversy is raising its ugly head again, with some Northern European liberals deliberately tweaking the Prophet’s beard.

TPPR shares with Voltaire the belief that, in principle, freedom of expression is an absolute right (otherwise we would have been locked up years ago), but there does seem to be a difference between stating an opinion, no matter how wrong-headed, and asserting it as an offensive act in a cultural war.

Such a cultural war is now being played out, over most reasonable persons' heads, through a vicious cycle of symbolic acts, involving teddy bears in Sudan, valentines cards in Saudi Arabia, 'thought crimes' in London and, of course, these unfunny cartoons. 

The ignorance and arrogance on both sides is much as we have come to expect from solipsistic Western intellectuals and those people of faith whose identity is wrapped up in the outer forms rather than the inner reality of their beliefs.

One side will adopt the counter-terror ethic of banning all reference to Caliphate theory much as it silences national socialist 'theory', while the other will wrongly associate liberal values with a highly charged distaste for religion, especially Islam.

Meanwhile, in a race against time, the Turkish Diyanet (the State body for religious affairs) is coming to the conclusion of its programme of liberal and revisionist reform of the Sayings of the Prophet, while the Pakistan Government, with every public order justification, almost closes down the internet in a desperate attempt to keep the cartoons off YouTube within its territory.

This cultural war - in which the real victims are always the 'little people', from the Copts in Egypt to the migrants in Flemish towns - is fuelled by a sensationalist media and political interests on both sides.

The radical liberals have forgotten that expressing oneself is only part of freedom. The second part is to do it responsibly, with an eye to respect for those who disagree with you and to the consequences. 

It is one thing to stand up heroically, aware of the consequences, within a tyranny and existentially take the risk of demanding the freedom to speak out (as many bravely do in authoritarian regimes).

It is another to do so in a free society and expect public policy to bend itself entirely to your opinion without taking account of the effects on others. The heroes of liberal thought are degraded by the bullies who appropriate them.

As expected, there have been sharp reactions across the Muslim world, notably in Sudan and Pakistan, to the latest promotion of the Danish cartoons. Boycotts of Danish products are increasing, notably in stricter wahhabi and mahdist communities (officially so in Sudan) and there have been demonstrations and actions in Yemen, Jordan, Gaza, Syria and Egypt.

Here is just a selection of recent news reports ...

• Sudan
• Pakistan
• Egypt
• Yemen
• Qatar

In Denmark itself, Hizb ut Tahrir [the Caliphate group demonised by the liberal Right] demonstrated peacefully the streets of Copenhagen on February 15th, with the authorisation of the Danish government.

However, Villy Sovndal, President of the Popular Socialist Party declared that if the Muslims of Denmark wanted to set up a caliphate, they should go and live in a Middle Eastern dictatorship. 

This is a bit like those Alf Garnetts of yesteryear telling Lefties that "if you like the Soviet Union so much, why don't you bleeding well go and live there." Not exactly an intellectually sophisticated response.

The Danish Prime Minister labelled Hizb ut-Tahrir, probably quite rightly, as "anti-democratic" and then congratulated Sovndal stating that "the debate on (our) values was on the right track" (Le Monde 25 February). 

Hmmmmm! So debate on values is only legitimate if it presupposes liberal democracy - that's on some philosophically dodgy ground to say the least but is clearly the trend in Western thinking. 

There are many, many arguments against Caliphate thinking and its relevance to modern Europe but we have to do better than this - certainly, throwing insults at the enemy's deepest and most cherished beliefs is no substitute for thinking and engagement.

None of this is of great significance in London at this time, but there is nervousness of infection from both sides – Caliphate ‘nutters’ and hard-line dim-witted extreme liberals.

Both sides are way out of line, with the Caliphatics being a tiny minority of Muslims in Europe and the extreme liberals mostly making intellectual points for the drawing room and for domestic political reasons.

In many ways, the Muslim-Liberal cultural war in Europe (similar to the neo-con/Zionist-Muslim war in the US) is just another manifestation of Western cultural fragmentation.

Instead of embracing that fragmentation as a creative competitive advantage as we do in London, New York and Los Angeles, European extremists seem to want to create the security blanket of a republican virtue that has never existed except as disguised oppression of 'difference'. Of course, I write with the typically British suspicion of Jacobinical 'enthusiasms'.

Europe has also been much exercised by something scarcely noted in London but of considerable cultural significance in a wider context. In Anglo-Saxon countries, asserting one’s own ethnic or cultural identity is rarely regarded as a threat to the constitution unless you go into direct criminal opposition to it.

Europe's republican tradition has identity more bound up with the wider culture - after all, many of its national identities had required the relatively recent suppression of smaller linguistic identities in waves of enforced state formation (as the British Crown once did to the Welsh). Ask the Occitans and Catalonians.

The emergence of a new faith-based and regionalist culture of difference is unnerving republican traditionalists.

Cem Özdemir, MEP, a German Green and so a liberal in the American sense, and a naturalized German at the age of 18, declared, in response to Erdogan (not that Erdogan was saying much else in practice), that Turks should accept the democratic principles of their country of residence.

Özdemir is far more typical of European (and American) Muslims than the Caliphatics. The 'debate' with Hizb Ut-Tahrir is a massive red herring that rather suits the new Liberal Right (in which category we must include many alleged 'socialists') in its struggles for influence and power within Europe.

He points out that Turks are not so understanding of Kurds and this is another problem. Let us leave what Özdemir believes and point out a common factor on both sides - both are not concerned with strengthening their own communities so much as trying to pressure and reform the other without full understanding of local conditions and realities.

Erdogan's public declaration did nothing to help the Turkish cause amongst the public in several countries (Belgium, France, The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Norway) that (unlike London) fear Turkish entry into the EU.

There is, of course, a similar but far lower key debate in the UK but the assimilationist model is cast in more American terms and faces strong resistance from a generally anti-republican and libertarian culture outside the London salons. In the UK, Muslims are expected to sustain a private life, work hard and respect the secular state.

Erdogan’s statement in Germany has been scarcely noticed because it would be British Pakistanis who would have told an interfering Pakistani Islamist PM to mind his own business if he stepped over a line, while the milder thesis that a Pakistani can be both Pakistani and British is uncontroversial in itself.

The wave of largely ignorant commentary on Archbishop Rowan Williams' opening of a debate on sharia law merely confirmed that the undermining of this loose, liberal consensus (that you can be who you like so long as you obey the law) by suggesting another law was just not acceptable - it did not mean that Muslims were being asked to become 'someone else' and more British.

These are complex issues, but the bottom line is that the central debate (in both the UK and Europe, in their different contexts) is moving away from terrorism and war per se towards issues of culture and assimilation. The lineaments for longer term re-alignments in what passes for ‘left’ and ‘right’ in this context have begun, yet the final trajectory is uncertain.

It is probable that indigenous republican populism will tend to the right (more ambiguously in the UK) and libertarian approaches to the left (though, again, these attitudes seem to be emerging on the British centre-right). As we have seen, many socialists take a radical republican position, while many traditionalist conservatives adopt more easy-going approach.

Whatever is happening, the cultural differences between core Europe (where the debate is cast in similar terms in French, Nordic and Germanic cultures) and the UK still seem to be profound, with the Mediterranean cultures representing yet another, more tolerant and (ironically in terms of stereotypes) far less excitable model.

The fourth major zone is, of course, the ‘East’ whose focus is Russia rather than Islam and who produce a migrant flow of their own. Whether this lot can ever be truly united is a moot point but the cultures of the major US zones are equally diverse and somehow it works.

How this will play out politically is pure speculation at this stage but, if the European Project does complete itself (which, on the odds, is probable), then we can see the distinctive regional political cultures of America re-emerging in a different form in Europe.

For Deep South, American West, Mid-West, Eastern Seaboard, read Euro-Mediterranean, Atlantic, Core Europe and the East.

The future logic is for British and Mediterranean cultures to tend to one broad model and Core Europe another, with the East as ‘swing voters’. The East may have disproportionate influence to its numbers for a while - much as it does in the Eurovision song contest.

As in the US, the core ideology is likely to be quite 'right-wing' by recent historic standards but within a liberal framework. Leftists who see a Socialist Europe are living in cloud-cuckoo land and yet we may see major shifts within and between these regions as economic and cultural circumstances change. Coalitions may come up with surprising alliances as they do in America.

The increasingly ridiculous and dangerous cultural war between an Aunt Sally Islam and loopy radical liberals is important for this long term reason - far beyond the immediate issue of bad feeling between traditionalist Islam and Europe. 

It is setting the tone for the cultural alignments that will play their role in creating the 'grand coalitions' that will, one day, form the great parties of Presidential and Parliamentary Europe. And you are as good a judge of what those parties will come to represent as we might be at this early stage in the game ... the best advice is not to commit to anything too early.

www.tppr.co.uk

[TPPR is appreciative of information provided by Bood & Co. in Paris.  The interpretation is entirely that of TPPR and should not be assumed to be that of its correspondents]