SO another internet clever-clog sets the Middle East on fire: cartoons about the Holy Prophet (pbuh), then burning of the holy Quran, now a video of robed “terrorists” and a fake desert. The Western-Christian perpetrators then go into hiding (an essential requisite for publicity) while the innocent are asphyxiated, beheaded and otherwise done to death – outrageous Muslim revenge thus “proving” the racist claims of the trash peddlers that Islam is a violent religion.

The provocateurs, of course, know that politics and religion don’t mix in the Middle East. They are the same. Chris Stevens (the American ambassador who died in the Benghazi siege), his diplomat colleagues, priests in Turkey and Africa, UN personnel in Afghanistan; they have all paid the price for those “Christian priests”, “cartoonists”, “filmmakers” and “authors” – the inverted commas are necessary to mark a thin line between illusionists and the real thing – who knowingly choose to provoke 1.6 billion Muslims.

When a Danish cartoon in a hitherto unknown newspaper drew a picture of the Holy Prophet (pbuh) with a bomb in his turban, the Danish embassy in Beirut went up in flames. When a Texas pastor decided to “sentence the Quran to death”, the knives came out in Afghanistan – we are leaving aside the little matter of the “accidental” burning of Quranic pages by US personnel in Bagram. And now a deliberately abusive film provokes the murder of one of the State Department’s fairest diplomats.

In many ways, it’s familiar territory. In 15th-century Spain, Christian cartoonists drew abusive illustrations of the Holy Prophet (pbuh). And – just so we don’t think we have clean claws today – when a Paris cinema showed a film which ridiculed Jesus Christ, the building was burned down, one person was killed and the killer was a Christian. With the help of our wonderful new technology it only takes a couple of loonies to kick off a miniature war in the Muslim world within seconds.

I doubt if poor Christopher Stevens – a man who really understood the Arabs as many of his colleagues do not – had ever heard of the “film” that unleashed the storming of the US consulate in Benghazi and his own death. It’s one thing to witlessly claim that the US would go on a “crusade” against Al Qaeda – thank you, George Bush – but another to insult, quite deliberately, an entire people.

Racism of this kind stirs many a crazed heart.

And has Al Qaeda – defeated by the Arab revolutionaries who demanded dignity rather than an Osama bin Laden caliphate across the Middle East – now decided to cash in on populist grievances to advance its Islamist cause? Libya’s largely impotent government blames the Americans themselves for Stevens’ killing – since the consulate should have been evacuated – and suggests that a Qadhafi clique was behind the attack. This is ridiculous. If the armed militia in Benghazi, calling itself the “Islamic Law Supporters”, are more than telephone gunmen, then Al Qaeda’s involvement has to be suspected.

Ironically, there is room for a serious discussion among Muslims about, for example, a reinterpretation of the holy Quran. But western provocation – and western, alas, it is – closes down such a narrative. Meanwhile, we beat our chests in favour of a “free press”.

A New Zealand editor once proudly told me how his own newspaper had re-published the cartoon of the Holy Prophet with a bomb-filled turban. But when I asked him if he planned to publish a cartoon of a rabbi with a bomb on his head next time Israel invaded Lebanon, he hastily agreed with me that this would be anti-Semitic.

By arrangement with The Independent