Nor is anyone suggesting that Christian retailers should be jailed for selling the Bible, even though twisted organisations from the Ku Klux Klan to the Lord’s Resistance Army have cited scripture for their purpose.

But following my recent post on bad books, in which I stated that police have threatened Islamist bookshops with prosecution for selling Seyyid Qutb’s ‘Milestones’, a reader has emailed to inform me that things have moved a step further.

In the dock at Kingston Crown Court right now is Ahmed Faraz, who runs a radical Islamist publishing house and bookshop in Birmingham, trading as Maktabah. While his story has been little reported, you can read an outline of what is going on here.

As the prosecution is making plain, Faraz has never been connected to any specific terrorist plot. However, some of its publications were found in the possession of men such as 7/7 bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan, while airline plotter Arafat Khan quoted from Maktabah’s version of ‘Milestones’ in his martyrdom video.

Max Hill QC, prosecuting, puts the matter like this: ‘To encapsulate it in a single phrase, this case is about priming people for terrorism.’

Islamist material of this nature is open to varying interpretations. ‘Milestones’ itself is notable for its syncretism, at least in the eyes of readers raised in the western tradition of political thought.

Some academics have insisted – not, I feel, persuasively - that it draws heavily on Leninist notions of the vanguard party; others have highlighted its anti-semitic content as pointing to affinity with fascism. Very plainly this pamphlet does advocate violence, not for its own sake but on the philosophical grounds that the end justifies the means. In that sense, there are parallels to well-known classics from a wide range of political and religious creeds.

I am not going to come to any conclusions specific to the Faraz trial on the back of one Daily Mail report. But on that limited knowledge, let me offer a few observations.

First, both ‘Milestones’ and another of the works that Faraz is in the dock for selling are available on good old Amazon.co.uk. If he is on trial for ‘disseminating terrorist publications’, why isn’t the world’s largest online retailer?

Second, when did it become the job of the British state to regulate what political books those of us that live in Britain can and cannot read? I read ‘Milestones’ and did not go out and bomb the number 30 bus; can it be demonstrated that the act of bookselling ever primes anybody for anything?

7/7 may well have happened whether or not Kahn had even heard of Qutb. Attacks on selected vendors of his works represents both double standards of the worst kind and a further erosion of the vital freedom of intellectual inquiry.

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When Sweden began extradition proceedings against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for alleged sexual offences last year, the default assumption of many of his political backers was that this simply had to be a set up.

Take this article from one leftwing publication, for instance. No mention is made of the substance of the accusations he faces, and there is a blanket assertion that he should not be sent to Stockholm, presumably in any circumstances. The very possibility that he may have something for which to answer is simply not countenanced.

Many feminists pointed out at the time that just because a man happens to be flavour of the month on the left, that does not render him incapable of violence or other misconduct against women.

Similar logic was at work in the Tommy Sheridan debacle. There is no suggestion that Sheridan ever engaged in anything other than consensual behaviour between adults, it should be stressed at once.

But his supporters were adamant that the idea he patronised swingers’ clubs just had to be a smear job on the part of News International, and that comrades therefore had some kind of political duty to lie on his behalf.

This is not be argue that intelligence services or the rightwing media would never dream of rigging a sexual misdemeanour case against someone who has damaged their interests, although Assange himself has ruled out CIA involvement. Rape suspects are of course included in the standard presumption of innocence.

But it is to insist that rape be taken seriously, and that men with a position of prominence in public life are no more exempt from due process than their low-profile counterparts. Nothing so far leads me to believe that Britain is handling the Assange affair in biased fashion.

Some of Assange’s backers are extending their unconditional support to International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who has been charged with attempting to attack and rape a hotel chambermaid.

The story is ‘absurd’ and ‘extraordinarily stupid’ attempt by the financial elite to knobble a socialist contender for the French presidency, one US rightwinger maintains. Nor is he the only conspiracy theorist on the case. Even one of Sarkozy’s ministers has publicly hinted that this could all be a trap.

It may indeed be tempting to rush to judgement in matters of sexual misconnduct, making whether we rate someone as a good guy or a baddie the key criterion. As the Sheridan debacle should underline for socialists, the real world doesn’t work like that.

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The charge is desecrating a grave. But Ms Sin’kova insists that if she was desecrating anything, she was desecrating ‘a propaganda memorial for a totalitarian communist regime’. She is planning an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

We’ve had several parallel incidents in Britain, of course. In 2000, former soldier James Matthews got 30 days and a £250 fine for slapping a green turf Mohican on a statue of Winston Churchill. He also symbolically applied red paint to the mouth area, to make it appear as if it was dripping with blood.

Last year, Wendy Lewis – a woman with evident booze and drug problems – got a 15-week suspended sentence for pissing on the war memorial in Blackpool and then ‘performing a sex act’ on an unidentified nearby man. It was all caught on CCTV.

Her charming boyfriend escorted her away from court, performing a Nazi salute and shouting pro-Irish Republican Army slogans at services veterans peacefully protesting outside.

Then there was the case of Charlie Gilmour, adopted son of Pink Floyd guitarist David, who was arrested after swinging from the Union Jack on the cenotaph during the student fees demos last December. Daddy was no doubt more than able to stump up the bail.

Perhaps these instances cannot be readily compared. Motivations here range from art (allegedly) to properly thought-out protest, and from being permanently out to lunch to simply being a pillock.

I even have intellectual sympathy for Mr Matthews’ assessment of Mr Churchill, and perhaps Ms Sin’kova has an arguable – if somewhat tenuous – case. Ms Lewis sounds as if she needs help rather than jail time, and it would probably be charitable to write off Mr Gilmour’s indiscretion as youthful high jinks that did not actually cause any damage.

Desecrating war memorials – and in the British context, a statue of Churchill effectively functions as a war memorial – goes beyond simple speech and can involve damage to property. It will also be offensive to many who can point to gaps on our family tree that result from the major conflicts of the twentieth century. It is, in short, not a morally commendable action.

But this blog has over the last five years argued against the prosecution of persons as diverse as holocaust denier David Irving, Qu’ran burner Terry Jones, poppy burner Anjem Choudary, the Billy Boys at Ibrox, swastika-emblazoned Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte baker Manfred Klaschka and ‘God hates fags’ preacher Rev Fred Waldron Phelps.

Just about everybody in Britain will find one or more of these specimens odious in the extreme. I personally detest the lot of them. Yet ultimately it is not the job of the state to protect people from injury to feelings. Sin’kova may be a spectacularly stupid and misguided individual, but she should not be looking at an extended period behind bars for her vapidity.

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After all, what we are talking about is the mannered adoption of outlandish garb. Why get uptight about kids whatever silly clothes they want? They’ll grow out of it soon enough.

The context for these remarks, of course, is the entry into force on Monday of legislation in France that prohibits full-face veils in public. Two women have already been arrested, after staging some form of impromptu demonstration against the law.

I am completely in agreement with O’Neill that this measure is illiberal and a de facto attack on freedom to practice religion. It can never be right for the state to rule on what clothes people may or may not wear, and like him, I am opposed to the ban.

After that, however, our analyses sharply diverge. Secularists who support the right to wear the veil must also make clear that the support the right not to wear the veil as well, a point O’Neill conspicuously never raises.

The reasons why Muslim women do so will be many and varied. No doubt for some, it is really is simply a sartorial fad. And O’Neill even concedes that some European women are ‘under pressure’ from husbands and religious leaders to do so. But this apparently applies only to a small minority of cases:

[A]mongst the vast majority of Western-born Muslim women, the kind you see window-shopping on Bond Street, the adoption of the veil is a fashion statement more than a religious one; it is the Islamic equivalent of becoming a goth, only instead of desperately trying to stand out by wearing black lipstick and nine-inch-heeled Dr Marten’s, you do it by putting a veil on your head and instantly becoming mysterious.

Indeed, O’Neill has seen fashionable young Muslim women on the pull in Selfridge’s:

Their combination of Muslim veil and high fashion seemed designed to invite men’s gazes rather than to repel them; they were effectively saying “Look at us!”, not “Look away”.

But can it really be true that the ‘vast majority’ of Western-born Muslim women are of the kind likely to be found window shopping on Bond Street? I don’t have any statistics on the question, and I doubt that O’Neill does, either.

What I do know is that most Muslim Britons are from south Asian backgrounds, and are subject to the highest unemployment rates of any ethnic group in the country. On my understanding, the social position of Muslims in France is broadly similar.

The shop windows into which they gaze are more likely to be those of the pound shops of east London, and the halal butchers of the banlieues, than those of West End designer outlets. Despite O’Neill’s one-time membership of the Revolutionary Communist Party, class no longer seems to figure in his frame of reference.

For every Muslim girl trying on lippy and indulging in mildly flirtatious girl talk in a chic department store, there will be many more in the poorest districts of London and Paris who are wearing the veil because of family pressure.

I am aware of one secular women of Muslim origin, living in a Muslim majority area, who has been physically threatened with violence unless she covers her face. I suspect that she is not the only one to find herself in such circumstances. Does that trump the ‘lippy in Selfridge’s’ anecdote?

I don’t know if O’Neill considers himself to be on the left anymore. But I do notice that he somewhat pompously proclaims himself to be ‘dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms’. If that is really the case, he badly needs a rethink on this one.

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Mind you, pastry chef Manfred Klaschka can turn his hand to just about anything. If you should happen to like your Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte tastefully decorated with a Seig Heil-ing baby, Manfred is your man. Pix here. Need penis-shaped marzipan sweets, perchance? Hey, he can do you those, as well.

“If someone orders it, I make it,” Klaschka told a television station, denying any political motivation. “I don’t really think about it. Basically, it doesn’t interest me what the customers do with the cakes. I have to make a living.” It’s one up from the Nuremberg defence, I guess.

You can just picture those all those superannuated Tyrolean Waffen-SS men celebrating their 92^nd birthday with a Klaschka creation, probably failing to blow out the candles on account of their advanced age.

Inevitably, his culinary versatility has led to complaints from holocaust survivor organisations, one of which has lodged a complaint with the public prosecutors’ office in Wiener Neustadt.

The display of Nazi symbols is a criminal offence in Austria, which famously banged up Brit neo-Nazi historian David Irving for a year on charges of holocaust denial. If Prince Harry ever gets an invite to a fancy dress party in Innsbruck, he should choose his outfit cautiously.

But technically speaking, the offending confectionary has not been on display, having simply been pictured in a catalogue. Tortendesign is presumably (just) on the right side of the law here.

It is easy to understand why some people will want to see legal action on this matter. What Klaschka is offering the punters is gratuitously offensive. Yes, the historical sensitivities are far more resonant in Austria than in a country where the third in line to the throne can shrug off his dressing up games as just a bit of a laugh.

Unlike such possible comparators as the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in 2005, he does not even have the defence that he is engaged in satire or has the intention of provoking public debate.

But the same underlying argument applies; that many will be upset by Klaschka’s inappropriate Apfelstrudel is not enough to merit a state ban. Freedom of cake decoration is the logical extension of freedom of speech.

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I did not see any serious violence, and that goes for both the protestors and the Old Bill. I’m not saying serious violence didn’t happen, just that I didn’t see it happen.

Ask me about aggressive behaviour, argy bargy and general unseemliness, and I’ll admit that the activists were hardly angels. But the policing was ridiculously heavy handed for much of the time.

By the time I arrived on the scene, around 150 young people were sitting on the plinth of Nelson’s Column, surrounded by maybe twice that number of the Met’s finest, who were rather more appropriately dressed for the occasion.

One or two of those on the monument - presumably fuelled by alcohol – decided to get in yer face with the forces of the state, who generally just stood there and took it. I also saw a crusty rather ostentatiously take his dick out and piss down onto the ground. Charming. But in my book, anarchists unleashing urine is not quite the same proposition as anarchists unleashing hell.

The statue itself had been graffiti’ed; no big deal – spray paint cleans off easily enough - although I’m not sure how that takes the fight against austerity forward. Nevertheless, there is a difference between vandalism and violence.

The ugliest thing that came to my notice occured in Craven Street, where the boys in blue wanted to push the demonstrators back and shoved their riot shields into some girls of about fifteen or sixteen. I won’t forget the look of fear on those poor kids’ faces in a hurry.

The police were clearly OTT in this case, and in other cases too. Several had blood on their protective gear. When I asked them about, they jokingly conceded that it was not their blood. Anyone who commits to tactics that involve confrontation with law should know the score; there is a risk of getting hurt.

But let’s not get things out of proportion. As an activist during the miners’ strike, the anti-apartheid protests, the poll tax campaign and the Wapping dispute, I have been in a riot or two. What happened in London last night does not merit the description.

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Yet today’s papers are full of dire predictions that a ‘violent minority’ are hell-bent on ‘hijacking a peaceful protest’. In particular, the Guardian is hyping up an article by some ex-copper on the website of a rightwing think tank, which contends that the Old Bill have ‘strong intelligence’ that ‘extremist groups are planning illegal acts of violence’ tomorrow.

I suppose that now that Clare Solomon has been voted out of sabbatical office at the University of London Union, she will be at a bit of a loose end. For all I know, she could be holed up in her Malet Street bunker, making Molotov cocktails with Laurie Penny even as I write.

Then there’s your anarchists, innit. Always up for a ruck, that lot, and haven’t really had an outing in this country since the poll tax that took place twenty years ago almost to the day.  I have strong intelligence that some of them still have sufficient giro money left over to pay for enough cans of Special Brew to get them hyped up for a showdown with the state. Just don’t stand too near groups of people dressed in black and you should be OK.

It’s tempting to argue that these are just scare stories, gotten up by the media for the sole purpose of discouraging law abiding citizens from joining the demo. Policemen always have a vested interest in encouraging any speculation that points to the need to buy greater numbers of truncheons. Any group daft enough to discuss an impending ruck on FB are, by definition, hardly the most adept of conspirators.

Remember the Guardian’s ‘summer of rage’ front page story from February 2009? You know, the one in which the paper predicted that ‘middle class anger at economic crisis could erupt into violence on the streets’? Didn’t actually happen, though. Somehow we got through the year without Hugo and Sophie public spilling blood on Stoke Newington Church Street.

On the other hand, I don’t doubt that there are people out there who would like to give it a go, in the belief that they are somehow doing something constructive for the anti-cuts cause. I cannot think of any circumstances in which tactics any stronger than non-violent direct action could prove anything other than utterly counterproductive. Give it a miss, please.

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The central contention of Sarrazin’s best-selling book, ‘Deutschland schafft sich ab’ – or ‘Germany Does Away with Itself’ – is primarily a polemic against Muslim immigration into that country. It has reportedly had a major impact on the debate on multiculturalism. You can read a summary of his argument here.

Just to cover all relevant bases, this man also reckons that ‘all Jews share a certain gene’, a view that is scientifically speaking disproven, and which obviously carries with it dangerous historical resonances. Oh, and he doesn’t much care for Basques, either.

The German Society at the London School of Economics invited Sarrazin to participate in a panel discussion, due to take place on Monday night. The title was ‘Europe’s Future: the Decline of the West’.

The reference here is to a best-selling book of an earlier era, namely Oswald Spengler’s 1918 work ‘The Decline of the West’, which became a must-read for Germany’s Nazi intelligentsia, even though the author himself was a rightist of altogether more traditional stripe.

It’s a safe guess, then, that that cosy liberalism was never intended to be the dominant note of the evening. Even so, it is not clear to me that the extent of the furore which followed was in any way justified.

As well as protests from Jewish organisations, there was this reaction from Unite Against Fascism:

Sabby Dhalu, the joint secretary of Unite Against Fascism, called for Mr Sarrazin to be banned from the UK. “There is grotesque double standards in the implementation of bans on people entering Britain. There is no doubt that a known Muslim spouting similar views would be denied entry,” she said …

“Such vile, racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic views have no place in Britain, Germany or any other country.”

Well, double standards cut both ways, don’t they? On Dhalu’s logic, UAF should be against the entry into this country of Muslims with opinions still more grotesque than Sarrazin’s.

For instance Zakir Naik – who argues that ‘every Muslim should be a terrorist’ and that ‘there are many Jews who are good to Muslims, but as a whole the Koran tells us, as a whole, they will be our staunchest enemy’ – addressed the Oxford Union by video link last weekend. But if UAF mobilised any protest against such vile, racist and anti-semitic views, I must have missed the press release.

After initially backing the German Society’s right to host the debate, management at the LSE got cold feet and pulled the plug on the event, citing its inability to maintain order. The proceedings were subsequently rescheduled for a London hotel.

So chalk up a victory for anti-racism, then? I’m afraid not. While there is a tactical case for a blanket ‘no platform for fascists’ policy aimed at those who promote violence on the streets, Sarrazin does not fall within that category.

His evening suit Islamophobia may be objectionable, but attempts to suppress his right to express them are more objectionable still. There remains a crucial difference between ‘no platform for fascists’ and ‘no platform for the not very nice’.

Freedom of speech should be a central value for any rational humanist left. If it was correct to oppose the Home Office ban on a racist such as Naik entering this country – which I did on this blog last year – then consistency demands that even someone as patently nasty as Sarrazin be allowed to free expression too

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The man and the woman are trailed home by a squad of heavily armed Muscle Marys, who wait outside the premises for about half an hour, thereby allowing time for all necessary seduction preliminaries.

And as soon as the bedroom light is switched out, a snatch squad hammers down the front door just as the hapless couple are about to make the beast with two backs. She is sent away with a warning, at least if this is her first offence. What about him? Best not ask.

You may mock. But be thankful to Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips for sounding a timely wake up call for heterosexuals by highlighting the current ‘ruthless campaign by the gay rights lobby to destroy the very ­concept of normal sexual behaviour’.

That’s right. Not only is there a concerted drive to eliminate straight shagging, but even the idea of it is soon to be eradicated as an ‘all-­powerful gay rights lobby carries all before it’. As Ms Phillips contends, ‘just about everything in Britain is now run according to the gay agenda’.

All of this is proceeding in line with a carefully-crafted step-by-step masterplan, which commences with an ‘attempt to brainwash children with propaganda under the ­camouflage of ­education’ and culminates in a ‘gay inquisition’ aimed at Christian hoteliers. And nobody expects the gay inquisition, whose two chief weapons are fear and surprise.

Except, of course, things are not quite like that, are they? Joking aside, it is true that this country has moved on a long way from the blatant homophobia once actively promoted by the Thatcher government and newspapers like … well, like the Daily Mail.

Thanks to laws enacted by New Labour, discrimination against gays has largely been eliminated, and as a straight bloke myself, I am sure that the overwhelming majority of people of whatever sexual orientation are entirely happy with this change.

It is no more morally acceptable for the keepers of some crappy little guesthouse to deny civil partners a room for the night than it would be for them to insist on the ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ policy that was once commonplace.

Nor are religious people penalised for speaking and acting in accordance with their religious beliefs, as Ms Phillips also contends. If anything, the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 gives them rather more protection than is desirable in a secular society.

But to hype up a couple of cases of over-zealous political correctness on the part of some overly right-on civil service apparatchiks into a paranoid rant suggesting that those nasty Stalinist shirtlifters are on the brink of imposing queer totalitarianism is entirely over the top.

If I did not know Melanie Phillips better, I’d almost be tempted to suggest that she has – to use one of her own favourite buzzwords – ‘an agenda’.

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And most of the constituencies in which turnout is lowest are those with high proportions of the social layers most likely to find themselves banged up in prison; the very poor, the drug-addled, long-term benefit claimants, the mentally ill.

Until now, prisoners in this country have not had the right to vote. But my guess would be that only a few of them would exercise it if they did.

Now that situation is about to change, following a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights. The government is being forced to lift the ban on those serving terms of less than four years.

The Tory right doesn’t like this one little bit, and is planning a rebellion. Labour’s reported response is to line up with the hardcore hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade by introducing a wrecking amendment.

Maybe the leadership thinks this is clever politics and will heighten tensions within the coalition, and for all I know, they may be right. Then again, New Labour did produce a series of home secretaries not all that ideological distant from the Tory headbangers on law and order.

But in any case, Labour is badly missing the point. If prison is about rehabilitation rather than punishment – as it should be for the overwhelming majority of those behind bars – then anything that encourages elementary civic responsibility is avidly to be desired.

If voting is even a small step towards getting inmates to think about society as a whole and the direction in which they think it should evolve, it should be positively encouraged.

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