The firestorm of protests over the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper has most likely caught most people in the Western world by surprise.

That helps to demonstrate the lack of understanding that that, broadly speaking, some Muslims have for the principles of freedom of speech, but also the lack of understanding most people in the west have about Islam.

Any newspaper has has a fundamental responsibility to defend and uphold the right to freedom of speech. There have been times in Bermuda when freedom of speech has seemed to be under threat, most recently when the Progressive Labour Party seemed to suggest that Julian Hall was lucky he did not face reprisals for "flirting publicly with yet another third political entity".

This newspaper has defended the principle when it has come under threat.

It is easy to defend freedom of speech when that speech reflects what most people think. But freedom of speech is crucial for the voicing of unpopular, unfashionable and sometimes offensive statements or beliefs.

That is why the American Civil Liberties Union went to court to defend the rights of the Ku Klux Klan to march, and it seems to be at the heart of the defence of the newspapers who have published the cartoons of Mohammed.

The cartoons were initially published last September as part of a story on the difficulties a writer was having finding an illustrator to draw pictures of the Prophet Mohammed for a book on his life. The problem was that moderate Muslims were afraid to draw the cartoons, not out of any strong religious feeling, but because of fears of reprisals from fundamentalists.

Surprisingly, there were no real protests about the cartoons when they were first published, but since a second newspaper, this time in Norway, published them in January, it has spiralled out of control.

Most of the pressure has been on the Danish government to apologise for the cartoons. It, rightly, has said it will not since it is the newspaper's responsibility. Would the Bermuda Government apologise to the world for something The Royal Gazette did? One would hope not.

The bottom line is this. Most of the cartoons are amateur. One, about how there are no virgins left in heaven, is funny. One cartoon showing Mohammed with a bomb in his turban is deeply offensive, not only to Muslims, but to all decent people.

This newspaper would not have published the cartoons for two reasons. One is their generally poor quality. The other is the fact that few of them seemed to get the point of the original story. Upholding freedom of speech does not mean it must be brandished in people's faces like a red flag to a bull. It must have some point and some relevance to be meaningful. The right to offend does not mean the right to offend all the people all the time.

And here, the lack of understanding of the history of Islam and the reason why "graven images" are frowned upon is important. Again, for many westerners, for whom faith and religion adherence has become almost casual, this is hard to understand. But to Muslims it is a central part of their faith. There is no more reason to mock it than there would be to mock Jews for the Holocaust.

Of course, that is no reason for embassies to be firebombed or for there to be riots in the streets.

And it does seem clear that extremists and some governments , notably in dictatorships like Syria and Iran, have encouraged and in some cases instigated the riots. That is as wrong as the original offence.

But these worldwide protests, fuelled by events as disparate as September 11, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the mistreatment of Muslim immigrants in Europe and the invasion of Iraq, point up a wider gulf of understanding between Islam and the West that must be bridged if the world is to have any hope of peace.