Bombers Read the Arts Pages

One of the topics on Question Time last week was whether the west has become a terrorist target because of our foreign policy or our culture. The liberal panelists uniformly blamed the war in Iraq, while the rightists admitted that our military actions may have increased the risk but warned that terrorists can not be allowed to dictate government policy.

I think they were far too quick to exonerate the role of culture in bringing jihadist bombers to our capitals and, as it happens, sitting on that Question Time panel was a stark example of what may have made us unsafe in our trains, streets and airports: Davina McCall.

Her celebrity as a presenter comes mainly from presiding over television shows Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother, in which people compete for fame and wealth by getting drunk, having sex, exposing their breasts and, on one notorious occasion, mocking the culture of a contestant from the east. It would be a surprise if these programs were very high in the personal favorites list on the Sky Plus boxes of the al-Qaida high command or the imams who wave explosive vests at impressionable young men in mosques.

Certainly the targeting of nightclubs in Bali and now allegedly in London suggests that disgust at the degeneracy and sexualization of western culture is one of the terrorists' motivations. And given that al-Qaida's most spectacular attack - the 9/11 plane bombs - pre-dated the invasion of Iraq, it suggests a broader abhorrence of what the countries represented.

I'm not suggesting that McCall is to blame for terrorism, or should retire from those lucrative freak shows, but merely that she should consider that, while one drawback of our political system is that the government can go to war without public consent, one advantage is the freedom to make a living from lurid and provocative entertainment, and that this may be part of what we are hated for.

This week, the terrorists seemed to confirm that they read the arts pages as well as the foreign pages when a senior al-Qaida figure released some violent literary criticism threatening Britain with retaliation for the award by "the Queen and Tony Blair" of a knighthood to Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses.

Rushdie has never been a figure of unanimous popularity in British life and the terrorists, who have shown a keen awareness of western culture in the timing of their interventions in elections, may have been aware of this. As a result of their intervention, the usual muttering has started about whether it's worth putting lives at risk for a novel or a novelist. But Rushdie must be supported, and I'd like to suggest that McCall leads the campaign for him.

Even allowing for the recent rise of buffet culture, in which consumers are more likely to snack from both the high and low tables of entertainment, it's probably a reasonable assumption that few Britons would list both Big Brother and the novels of Rushdie in their top five ways of having fun. Most of us probably resemble, for example, McCall or Michael Foot in being notably more sympathetic to one project than the other. Personally, I would tend to march on Westminster if novels started being banned but shrug mildly if Ofcom served a closure notice on Big Brother. But I can see that this position is hard to justify, and the rise of a psychopathic external censor has made it untenable. Resistance to al-Qaida forces us into a position where we must support both form of expressions or neither.

The standard definition of free speech is that it may involve allowing to be heard things that we would personally rather not hear, and this paradox has forced liberals into agonies over issues such as racism, immigration and offender profiling. The response to Islamist extremism opens exactly this trapdoor. If our culture is so wonderfully founded on tolerance then why shouldn't we tolerate, for instance, preachers and imams who advocate or celebrate the killing of Britons? The answer is that the difference is intention.

The publication of The Satanic Verses or the award of a knighthood to Rushdie may lead to violence or even death in societies of disproportionate sensitivities. The screening of Big Brother may eventually result in the suicide of a contestant and, in my view, probably will. But in neither of these cases was that outcome the governing motivation. Rhetoric that glorifies suicide bombers or demonises races, though, has only one aim, which is to destroy lives. So freedom of expression stops there, but not before it.

So, since the assault on our values of tolerance, we are all fans of Salman Rushdie and Davina McCall, whatever our instinctive reactions to their work may be. Sir Salman, if he must. Dame Davina, if she wants to be. We must cheer them all because the alternative is submitting to censorship by terror. Showbusiness and literary figures might think hard about their own role in making Britain a target before they next blame it all on our foreign policy.