DOUBLE standards? Of course. Whatever western countries may say about freedom of speech, such a thing as unlimited freedom of speech exists nowhere in the world.

You won’t find much of it in the American media when it comes to Israel. Try pointing out Israeli atrocities in the occupied Palestinian territories and you’ll attract strange glances and be hounded or ostracized if you are in the media or the exalted world of academe.

The American media didn’t distinguish itself for any conspicuous freedom of alternate opinion when the Bush administration was priming its guns for the invasion of Iraq. All we heard were outrageous lies, even from that paragon of uprightness, Colin Powell, who has the rest of his life to live down his performance before the Security Council when he said Saddam Hussein possessed dangerous weapons.

There are plenty of voices now raising the banner of dissent but precious few then, the mainstream American media, partly out of fear and partly out of conviction, putting on a tight mask of self-censorship.

It is a penal offence in some European countries to glorify Nazism and deny the Holocaust. The historian David Irving is in an Austrian prison for this ‘offence’. Why? He says the ‘six million holocaust’ story is a vast exaggeration. Jews were killed as were others but little in the archives supports the theory that the Nazis discussed any ‘final solution’. We are entitled to our opinions but making this a penal offence? Not much freedom of speech here.

One of Irving’s greatest sins: his assertion (backed by proof) that the gas chamber tourists get to see at Auschwitz was constructed after the Second World War by the communist authorities in Poland, a replica to represent the original. Imagine the outrage this caused.

This whole thing is a bit funny. Anti-Semitism, historically, was a European vice, existing long before Hitler. In contrast, there is no demonizing of Jews in Islam which in fact honours them as ‘people of the Book’. Whether six million Jews or even more were killed by the Germans, this was a European problem for which there ought to have been a European solution. Yet it is the people of Palestine paying the price of Europe’s sins.

In Doha, Qatar, two years ago, at something billed as a US-Islamic world dialogue the American organizers (the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution) went on and on about the dangers of extremism. I hesitantly pointed out that we were suffering from two kinds of extremisms. We had our bin Ladens and there was no shortage of bin Ladens — otherwise known as neo-cons, I helpfully added — in Washington. There was a round of applause from the non-American members of the audience but the American professors and think-tankers, a whole galaxy of them, looked stunned as if I had uttered something profane.

And there was former American ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrooke, declaring we would be better off if we avoided two subjects: Israel and Iraq. Asked what we might talk of instead, he suggested education and health-care in the Islamic world.

Of course we have our problems. Our countries languish under one form of authoritarianism or the other, democracy being something the lands of Islam have yet to discover. All the same, no harm in pointing out double standards amongst the free and the brave.

So, please, let us not invoke freedom of speech to condone the Danish cartoons depicting the Holy Prophet (PBUH). Any Muslim seeing them will be provoked. The outrage we are seeing is perfectly understandable.

However, the kind of reaction we have seen across the Muslim world gives the Danish cartoons more importance than they deserve. Some things are best ignored or treated with contempt. As such, while protests and rallies are in order, resorting to violence is to go over the top.

And let’s not forget the other things equally deserving of our anger. The world of Islam should have raised a collective voice against the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. But if memory serves, that glorious organization called the Organization of Islamic Conference has been unable to come up with even a mild resolution condemning America. The world of Islam should have a collective response to America’s attempts to bully Iran. So far such a response has not been forthcoming.

Why is there such a gulf between rulers and ruled in the Muslim world? Because both exist on different planes, rulers for the most part acting as US stooges, the masses yearning for some form of redemption. No wonder, when given the chance, the masses strike a blow against the status quo, voting for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or for Hamas in the Palestinian occupied territories.

Nothing is more fragile or more rotten in the world of Islam than the status quo. The Americans should never press their luck with democracy in the Muslim world because if democracy arrives — something on which I am not betting — American influence will go out of the door. The necessary condition for American hegemony over Muslim oil is Muslim autocracy. One serves the other.

One fallacy about Osama bin Laden needs to be put to rest. Terror or the use of it is not his aim. Terror is a means to fulfil the aim of driving the US from the lands of Islam.

We may not agree with this aim or with the methods employed to achieve it, but for the sake of clarity, if nothing else, we should understand it. Only then can we understand the attraction of bin Ladenism for a broad spectrum of opinion in the world of Islam.

Bin Laden’s attraction lies not in his particular vision or interpretation of Islam which, unless I am grossly mistaken, does not accord with mainstream Muslim thought. It lies in his willingness to defy and challenge American power. At a time when Islamic countries look no better than American pawns, here’s an individual fighting America. This is the source of his growing mystique.

The US has tried to fight bin Ladenism with counter-terror. It hasn’t worked. In fact, the CIA (read Steve Coll’s book ‘Ghost Wars’) was trying to get bin Laden well before the September 11 attacks. But he proved elusive then and is proving elusive now.

Through satellite and electronic surveillance, Afghanistan must be the most intensely watched country in the world. But to no avail. Bin Laden hasn’t been spotted much less caught despite the fact that he has three wives, a retinue of children and a large number of bodyguards.

No wonder Americans are frustrated and taking out their frustration on that handiest of targets, Pakistan. If Osama is not to be found, he must be hiding somewhere in Pakistan, and if he is doing that it means that the Pakistan army and Gen Musharraf are not doing enough to get him.

This is the feeling finding expression in the recent angry editorials in the Washington Post and the New York Times against Musharraf, his once-unchallenged status as America’s darling under serious threat. He was expected to deliver Osama bin Laden and since he hasn’t, questions are bound to be asked about his continuing utility for the Americans.

There’s no running away from it, the world of Islam is in a fix. It has a fair idea of what ails it. But it doesn’t know what to do. Al Qaeda and the resistance in Iraq are about the most dynamic things — by which I mean things on the move — -in the world of Islam today. But does Al Qaeda represent the aspirations of the world of Islam? No, it doesn’t. A regime ordained by Al Qaeda would be suffocating to live under.

But as long as Muslim kings and autocrats remain in thrall to America, and Muslim masses are not masters of their fate, there will be no shortage of recruits — young men burning with zeal and a sense of mission — drawn to the ranks of such movements as Al Qaeda.