Don't rain on my parade

The demonstrations by a small but vociferous gaggle of protestors during a "homecoming" march of the Royal Anglian Regiment in Luton on Saturday has led to a predictable outbreak of Muslim bashing in the media, with the Daily Mail and the Telegraph leading the charge, and commentators on their articles online suggesting everything from charging them with treason to deporting them, or both.

What these people don't get is that free speech is free speech for everyone. Even people who you might consider to be well beyond the lunatic fringe, people like Omar Bakri who are one stop beyond Barking and quite a long way off the bus route.

Free speech is what makes us the good guys. You may not like what these people claim, or say, and personally, I think that many of them put the "mentalist" into "fundamentalist" but as long as they do not break the law, they have a right to protest.

Whether they were protesting in the right place, at the right time, against the right people, is another matter. Personally I think it is possible to respect and admire the professionalism of our armed forces, who are doing a fairly difficult job since our politicians turned them into professional targets in two distant and nasty battlefields that were never, and never should have been, of our choosing.

I do so despite being an implacable opponent of the Iraq war (the wrong war against the wrong enemy, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons) and despite being ambivalent about the engagement in Afghanistan. I think our friends in Al Mujiharoun or whatever it's called were shooting at the wrong target. If their banners had accused Bush and Blair of being terrorists and baby-killers, it might have been nearer the mark.

As it is, all these dismal fanatics have done is add a few hundred new recruits to the BNP's ranks, fuelled the mad xenophobic rantings of The Sun with its gung-ho BNP-lite campaign of "Help for Heroes" and hasten the day when we have white v. Muslim civil war on our streets. They may well view the latter as "progress" in their own warped way, a self-fulfilling prophecy, part of a philosophy similar to the cowards who gun down unarmed pizza delivery men in Northern Ireland.

People like Melanie Philips in the Daily Mail have been quick to condemn the protestors, whereas previously she was arguing in favour of Geert Wilders being allowed to enter the UK and show his anti-Muslim film, in the name of that very same "free speech". We must draw the inevitable conclusion that she believes in free speech, but only when it is on a topic she agrees with. The media of course has done its predictable thing of seeking out the most extreme Muslim loopy fruits it can find and asking them to refuse to condemn the protest. It's a bit like interviewing Jack the Ripper for a piece on prostitution. You sort of know what you are going to get.

I am glad at any rate that moderate Muslim leaders came out against the demonstration, even though they were largely ignored for doing so and even though in some cases, their mandate to speak for all British Muslims is in any case, at best, questionable, especially since a whole younger generation has been radicalised and alienated by the war in Iraq.

I don't suppose this will be the last instance of this sort of thing. There may be other, nastier confrontations ahead. The army isn't going to stop holding homecoming parades because they are in turn under pressure from the government and the MOD to behave as if there is nothing to be ashamed of, and something to be proud of. There is, in a sense, something to be proud of, but it's not the glib assertions of the politicians.

I really do hope though that if this crowd of rentamob would-be mujihadeen shows up at another event, that the crowd takes its cue from the behaviour of the troops of the Royal Anglian Regiment last weekend, and roundly and comprehensively ignores them.

And I also hope that the police will demonstrate that there is not - as some commentators claim - one law for them and one for us by arresting and charging any protestors whose banners they consider constitute incitement. There are perfectly workable, servicable laws on this topic. and they should be employed where necessary, and like all laws, without fear or favour.