Over the last two weeks, like many people, I’ve felt compelled to read as much as I can about the Paris attacks of the 7th of January, perhaps in an attempt to make some kind of sense of those terrible events. On that day, armed fanatics broke into the premises of a satirical magazine and snuffed out the lives of 11 of the magazine’s staff, injuring 11 more, firing something in the region of 50 bullets, each deadly projectile accompanied by a gunman’s voice shouting repeatedly in Arabic, ‘God is the greatest’.

And there has been much to read on the subject. In just a few days I’ve digested a quite extraordinary range of viewpoints: I’ve read reactionary demands for all Muslims to take the blame, and to apologise for the attacks. I’ve read British writers say with conviction that the Paris attacks, and all Islamist crimes, are to be blamed solely and squarely on western foreign policy. I’ve read passionate defences of the idea of free speech, and I’ve read equally committed assertions that freedom of speech must have limits and come accompanied by responsibilities. I’ve also read Arab liberals decry their western counterparts’ self-flagellating, instead imploring us to recognise that Jihadism is the ultra-conservative right wing of Muslim culture, a new and global recrudescence of the fascist impulse – something, therefore, that simply must be fought.

On social media I’ve seen anti-racist French cartoons obtusely decried as racist; just as I’ve heard anti-racist liberals make arguments that sounded to me both racist and illiberal. I’ve read arguments about whether cartoons should be censored, about whether we have the right to offend or the right to silence those who offend us, as well as various arguments that appeared to question whether left is in fact right, right is left, up is down, the victim is the oppressor, choice is tyranny, and whether the moon might in fact be made exclusively of cheese. Ok, I made that last one up.

The tendency of some western liberals to out themselves as cowering capitulators whenever something horrible happens has left me almost speechless. I was horrified when I read Tim Lott’s article on the Guardian website, which blithely asserted, with no evidence, that all ‘belief systems’ are essentially religions and that “we are all in the same boat as the jihadists who elevate and concretise their improbable set of beliefs into an inflexible ideology.”

He then hammers the point home with this: “On this definition, business is a religion, career is a religion, family is a religion, nation is a religion, secularism is a religion, and religion is a religion. There is no getting away from it.”

Well, there is one way of getting away from it, and that’s by realising that it’s the most appalling nonsense. There is no perfect world – we don’t live in Utopia now and we never will – but we can quite effectively judge any belief system by judging the actions of those who adhere to its beliefs.

By that measure alone, I can immediately think of several ways in which those who adhere to the extremist, jihadist belief system behave in a markedly more despicable and morally inferior way compared to, say, people whose ‘belief system’ orbits around the imperfect-but-preferable constellation of tolerance, pluralism, democracy, human rights, freedom of speech and respect for women. Frankly, it’s no contest, and there is nothing whatsoever to be gained from such mindless moral equivalence.

Yes, it’s been a strange couple of weeks. We’ve heard of fears of a rising tide of anti-Muslim prejudice while also watching a genuine rise in anti-semitism across Europe. Of course, some of the ‘Islamophobia’ fears are fully justified and need addressing. This issue, however, is made thoroughly opaque, firstly by the term ‘Islamophobia’ itself – which fails to distinguish between opposition to the doctrines of a religion with a hatred of people who share an ethnicity – and by both Muslims and non-Muslims alike failing to make one other very vital distinction.

The distinction I refer to is between two ‘rights’, both much discussed and often conflated as if they were exactly the same thing. The first problem is, they are not the same. The second problem is, only one of these rights actually exists.

The first of the two ‘rights’ I’m referring to is the right that all Muslims have – that all people have – to live freely, to choose their own lives and to practice their own religion (or any religion, or no religion), and to enjoy their lives and their customs without fear of oppression. This is a right that all people should have, and we should all be steadfast in supporting this right, for everyone, including those whose belief system contradicts our own. This is the heart of pluralism, and the heart of tolerance.

On the other hand there is the right ‘not to be offended’: the right to demand the silence of those whose opinions offend us. Let us, please, be clear on this point: Britain’s Muslims do not have that right. No one else has that right, either. This ‘right’, the right not to be offended, simply does not exist – and can’t possibly exist – in an open and free society.

In a free society, you have the right to offend. You also have the right to feel offended. But you do not have the right to hurt, or threaten, or demand the silence of, the person who caused your feeling of offence. You do not have the right to demand that offence not be given to you.

This is largely because offence is, in truth, taken rather than given, and our society has intelligently recognised that the person who carries central moral responsibility for you feeling offended… is you.

In the last two weeks there has been much online discussion about the pros and cons of Charlie Hebdo’s sense of humour, as if making an aesthetic judgment on what the magazine says has any bearing on its creators’ right to say it. No, again. Unless Charlie Hebdo’s satires on the religion of Islam are inciting other people to physically harm Muslims, then the magazine has every right to print its cartoons, whether you or I or anyone else likes them or not. And if anyone is offended, the answer is very simple – don’t look at them.

Disliking an image/text/film/utterance is not the same as questioning the right of its producer to have made/written/said it. You can despise the work of Charlie Hebdo yet still believe in its freedom of speech. That darling of the left Noam Chomsky once said, “if you don’t explicitly believe in free speech for people whose opinions you despise, then you don’t believe in free speech at all”, and on this point, at least, Chomsky was spot-on.

The confusion many people in the west understandably feel at the moment seems to me to be have been enflamed by two separate – and prolific – stupidities. The first is the stupidity of the political right, who want to blame not just Islam but all individual Muslims, or worse, make them ‘apologise’ for Paris. This is very stupid, both in its sinister denial of the individual agency of particular Muslims, and in its implication of the kind of ‘collective punishment’ practiced in history by the worst kind of tyrants. On the other hand, we have the stupidity of the political left, many of whom want, as usual, to excuse terrorist murder as being the ‘consequence’ of western foreign policy – or as they like like to snidely say, ‘blowback’ – and to thus mystifyingly align western liberalism with the most conservative, illiberal, reactionary and non-progressive political force in the world.

To both groups, I would suggest this: how about a change of tack, a shift of emphasis? Why not instead seek out, and make common cause with, all those liberal Muslims and people of Muslim heritage who are working and battling and striving to build a movement of reform and progressive values within the Muslim world itself? It is these people, and all the many ordinary Muslims across many countries, who are at all times most likely to suffer terribly at the hands of the Jihadist scumbags, after all.

This is the one point on which I regard the mainstream media as badly at fault. We have not seen anywhere near enough of these many brave and brilliant people, Muslims and of Muslim heritage, who are fighting this vital intellectual and spiritual battle. People like the brilliant Maajid Nawaz, an ex-radicalised and now ultra-liberal Muslim and proud campaigner against extremism; or the singer and activist Ani Zonneveld, musician, activist and  founder of  Muslims For Progressive Values, who writes about the importance of freedom of speech from a Muslim perspective here.  Or how about the many other women of Muslim heritage who are bravely speaking out against the uncountable crimes against their gender that are committed daily by the normalised and entrenched doctrines defended by many within their faith as sacred and unchangeable? Women like Karima Benoune, whose brilliant TED Talk, “When People of Muslim Heritage Challenge Fundamentalism” can be seen here, or secular feminists like the Iranian Maryam Namazie or the Algerian Marieme Helie-Lucas, both of whose views can be read in this worthwhile article from Democracy.net.

This last point – on the rights of women specifically – is one viewpoint that has not been heard anywhere near enough in our national media. With the exception of Suzanne Moore’s excellent piece on the Guardian website, “Add faithophobia to my crimes: I have no respect for religions that have little respect for me”, I’ve read far too little in the British media that is willing to make the basic, self-evident point that the treatment of women in traditional religious cultural settings, and especially in many parts of the Islamic world, is generally appalling and often horrific. When are we going to hear more voices speaking up to say that religious extremism, too, is a feminist issue? Soon, I hope.

Yes, there’s been almost too much to read on this subject over the last couple of weeks. But that fact, by itself, rather proves my point: in a society that morally and legally promotes and protects freedom of speech, a huge range of different views will naturally appear, and proliferate, and multiply, and be much discussed and debated and argued over – always. The question is: does this make us as a society better, or worse? I’m fairly sure it’s the former.

I’ve loved and admired some of what I’ve read about the Paris attacks over these last two weeks. And I’ve hated some of it, too. That is my right. But do I have the right to silence those whose views offend me? Should I have that right? Would I, myself, ever want to have that right?

No, no, and no.