Charlie Hebdo? Je suis Ahmed

Instead, it went for its usual juvenile piss-take of religion. A front cover depicting a cartoon figure of the Prophet Mohammed, a grotesque caricature of a pop-eyed, turbaned mullah, looking, of course, totally mad.

There were cartoons inside mocking the terrorists. Shouldn't one of these have occupied the key front-cover spot?

But no. How do we respond to last week's dreadful events? I know, let's start off by trashing yet again one of Islam's most deeply held tenets. Ha ha ha!

This is great humour?

Of course, Charlie Hebdo has the right to lampoon Islam and all other religions. I'll support that. When it comes to religion, I'm with John Lennon and his imaginings. Nor should we ever forget that satire never killed anyone - unlike a trio of religious fanatics with machine guns.

It's understandable that, in response to the murder of so many of their colleagues, the Charlie Hebdo survivors would want to make a statement. To demonstrate clearly that they wouldn't be intimidated by a bunch of Islamic fascists. That they wouldn't be deflected from their democratic right to take the piss out of whoever and whatever they like.

I just wished though that Charlie Hebdo - in this edition of all editions - could have reached out to Muslims. To make the point that the magazine was attacked by thugs who had as much to do with Islam as Eichmann had with Christianity.

They could have thought of ways to do it in a witty, subversive fashion. After all, that's their area of expertise.

Instead, they have another lazy swipe at Islam. Hey, that's what they do! Everything's a legitimate target. That's freedom of the press, that's freedom of expression, isn't it?

Of course, it is. Comedians have every right to mock, to be crass, insensitive, buffoonish. There's plenty of humour in such behaviour.

But comedians do need to make us laugh. I remember seeing translations of those famous Danish cartoons which mocked Islam. They just weren't at all funny.

Maybe that's the most damning criticism of the latest edition of Charlie Hebdo. Hey, guys, your front page wasn't at all imaginative.

The mean caricature. The tendentious "All is forgiven" tag. Who's forgiving who? Are Palestine, Guantanamo, the Iraqi War forgiven?

The cartoon didn't rise to the occasion. It just wasn't very good.

In the wake of the Hebdo massacre, there's been much talk of the need to defend the right to free speech. Three policeman died doing just that.

One of them, Ahmed Merabet, died so that Charlie Hebdo could exercise its democratic right to ridicule and insult all that he and his community hold most sacred. If it's a symbol of liberty we're looking for, Ahmed Merabet is a worthier choice than Charlie Hebdo.

I'm sure Ahmed would also have been prepared to lay down his life defending the Jewish victims in the kosher supermarket. That attack lays bare the fascistic evil of the perpetrators. They killed because they didn't like jokes. They killed innocents for no reason other than being different. They weren't defending a faith. They were promoting evil.

Jewish people in France suddenly feel less secure. History tells us they are right to be nervous. But let's not forget Muslims are a minority too. In France, freedom of expression does not extend to Muslim women wearing the veil in public places.

A well-functioning democracy requires the majority and the powerful to reach out to the weak and to minorities. It's fanatics like the Paris murderers who deal only in absolutes. It's fanatics who declare that sensitivity towards others is a weakness, that toleration of differences is the road to hell. Democrats should know better.

At the moment though, any suggestion of sensitivity towards Muslims' beliefs is lambasted as a fundamental attack on freedom, as giving in to terrorism, as a first step towards a European Caliphate.

There's a time and place for jokes. But we should lay off the cheap insults of Islam. Some things are not a laughing matter.