A long time ago I took to heart what Marx said when he commented “all criticism starts with a criticism of religion.” So, every Friday or Saturday evening, having drunk my fill, I would stop off in the grounds of the church on the way home and relieve myself over the statue of Saint Bernadette kneeling at a replica of the grotto at Lourdes. I’m pretty sure that the majority view in West Belfast at the time would have been that I was buying a one way ticket to hell. There’s no doubt that this act would have deeply offended a lot of people. That was part of the fun. I read later in one of Isaac Deutscher’s autobiographical essays that he did something equivalent involving a bacon sandwich and a rabbi’s grave just after he joined the Communist Party. Mercifully for both of us some of Blair’s pet laws to protect religions weren’t in force.

In our own crude ways Deuthscher and I were making a protest against religious superstition. One of the things that is now missing from a lot of the radicalisations that are taking place is the sense of a militant and conscious rejection of religion. The opposite is happening. Much of the fury against imperialism that is being expressed against imperialism and globalisation is being articulated in religious terms. There is nothing new there. Christopher Hill’s book on Oliver Cromwell,God’s Englishman,shows that after a ten minute browse. Cromwell convinced himself that the only course of action his reading of the Bible permitted was to cut off a king’s head and establish a republic.

All religions are inherently reactionary. They proscribe who, when, what you can or can’t eat, drink, love and do. They try to convince you that your internal monologue is actually a conversation with an omnisicient, eternal and omnipotent being.

Yet despite this they give millions of people the abstract concepts to understand the world. This understanding is often imperfect and twisted but it usually has some connection to what is actually happening. The Danish cartoons are a current example.

We are living through a war of ideas. Imperialism is waging, planning or supporting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechnya and Iran. Hundreds of millions of people across the globe are outraged by what they see happening. Many of them are Muslims who understand the suffering of their co-religionists in the language of their faith. In much of Europe there are large Muslim communities who share these sentiments. They tend to be some of the poorest and most oppressed groups in their societies. There is also a strong racist strand of opinion that resents the presence of these Muslims. The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten was playing to this audience. Their decision to print the cartoons was driven by racism. At least one of the cartoons was explicitly racist. That must have been understood by the editors. However if some of the cartoons had been printed by secularists from a Muslim background consciously rejecting Islam that would have a different matter.

Criticism of religion is only one part of what socialists do. When groups of people are being attacked because of their race, sexuality or relgion we stand up and defend them. That’s why on this occasion we take the side of Muslims against liberal racists.