The Mohammed Cartoons get yet more attention today in Times, with Andrew Sullivan adding his ‘considered’ opinion on the matter, all of which amounts to:

…much of the “offenceâ€? is contrived, that it has been manipulated by Islamists and the Syrian and Egyptian governments to advance their own agendas

Well yes, quite obviously.

…Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published them, deserves high praise for facing down Islamist bullies.

No, for reasons I’ll come on to in a moment, and

…in this new war of freedom versus fundamentalism I always anticipated appeasement. I just didn’t expect the press to be among the first to wave the white flag.

Maybe, but maybe not. Let’s just say at the moment that the press hasn’t done what it should have done, but that’s not necessarily what Sullivan thinks it should have done.

In fact the most accurate thing in Sullivan’s article is its headline ‘Islamo-bullies[sic] get a free ride from the West’, which as a general statement of the situation, I would agree with.

Yes, the bullying hard-liners in the Islamic world certainly have ‘got a free ride’ from the West on this issue but not because of press appeasement in the UK. The ‘free ride’ they’ve been given lies in reaction of westerners who’ve leapt unintelligently to the defence of free expression in Europe - which was never really under threat anyway - at the expense of doing little more than reinforcing the spurious claims of those extremists in the Islamic world who have been hawking the cartoons around to deliberately stir up trouble.

At the heart of this issue lies a good old fashioned propaganda war, and in terms of reaction in the Islamic world - we’ve lost. The ‘dick-swinging’ attitude of bandwagon jumpers in the European press and parts of the blogosphere, however well-intentioned some of that may have been, has succeeded in doing little more than playing right into the hands of Danish Imams, and now others, who were trying to stir up trouble in the first place.

If what we want to achieve here is to support more progressive, moderate and - dare I say it - enlightened elements in the Islamic world, then we’re having entirely the wrong debate here. This should not be about free speech in the West but about the use of propaganda in the Islamic world - our line on this should be:

1. We’ve, perhaps, inadvertantly caused offence.

2. This has arisen out of cultural differences and is all rather a misunderstanding.

3. Yes, we’re prepared to listen and understand your point of view, but…

4. Have you noticed how its your own hard-liners who’re deliberately winding this whole situation up to deliberately provoke conflict where we could all sit down and deal with this rationally?

Would this have stopped some of the protests? Certainly not.

Would this have made those protests substantially more difficult to justify in the Islamic world? Probably not, although they might have been less intense in some quarters.

Would it have called into question the action of those who have been hawking these cartoons around the Islamic world trying to stir up trouble? Absolutely, especially had we heavily pushed the line of ‘hang on there, there seem to be three extra images tacked on to the original cartoons and one of them’s a piss-poor photocopy of a weird guy at a pig-squealing competition and nothing to do with Mohammed at all’.

And instead of lecturing the Islamic world on ‘enlightenment values’ from the outside, should we not be working through rational dialogue to support the development of similar values within Islam and to encourage and support progressive elements within Islam.

It’s time for us to remember that once, a few hundred years ago, our own societies attitudes and values were not so very different from those to be found amongst those conservative elements in the Islamic world who seem, to us at least, to dominate Islamic culture and politics.

Yes, we come a long way from the days of the Spanish Inquisition, the divine right of Kings, the burning of witches and heretics and the concept of ‘Christendom’ but it’s not been easy and not without a terrible price in wars, revolutions and repression.

We take so many thing for granted in the West and treat them as if they have always been part of our culture, forgetting all too easily that, for example, homosexuality has only been legal in the UK for a matter of forty years and that it’s perhaps only in the last 10-15 years that widespread acceptance of the gay community has come to fruitition - and even then we still have our fair share of bigots to contend with.

One can take the same view in terms of the the equality of women. It’s less than a hundred years since women were granted the franchise anywhere in the world, let alone the UK and only just over 30 years since we put in place the Sex Discrimintion and Equal Pay Acts, putting equality on a legal footing.

The ideas that emerged from the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment may be of the order of 200-300 years old, but its only in the last half-century at most that many of those ideas have come to be realised.

It’s a long hard road we’ve travelled to get to where we are today - so what makes us think that we can demand that Islam walks that road overnight?