International Day of Anger

Michel Houellebecq faced charges of incitement to religious hatred when he published his novel Platform in 2001. Not only had he referred to Islam as "the world's most idiotic religion", he had predicted an attack by Islamicists on dissolute western tourists in Thailand, two years before the Bali bombing.

On September 10th 2001 Houellebecq's publisher felt the need to issue a public apology on behalf of the bestselling author and all round reprobate. Yet the the next day as Houellebecq sat and watched the hijacked planes slicing through the steel structure of the WTC, his writer friend Michel Déon was congratulating him: "you're saved!"

Very quickly Houellebecq's personal salvation became more general: in effect Osama Bin Laden had struck a major blow against the constraints of PC culture. For years ordinary citizens in the liberal democracies had been unable to intentionally offend all the minority groups whose sensibilities they so desperately wanted to discount, but now at last there was a permissable outlet, and one apparently sanctioned by all shades of politicians and cultural trend-setters. Even left-wingers could now safely vent their concerns about immigration, just as long as they dropped a few hints about religious differences and women's rights.

It didn't matter that elsewhere after 9-11 our real political freedoms were disappearing faster than the Siberian tiger, as long as we could bate the beardies − thereby unloading decades of pent-up liberal intolerance on these comparatively soft targets. Even the usually staid and bourgeois Danes have been provoked into a spasm of reckless bravado.

Over in Guatemala the lack of an indigenous base of Mohammedan green fascists hasn't stopped people recreating the basic ying yang divide of postmodern life. Yesterday members of an extremist cell of bible-bashers calling themselves the Social Cleansing of the Town were arrested after they set up checkpoints on a main highway near San Lucas Toliman (about 70 kilometres west of Guatemala City) and attempted to serve summary justice on passing individuals deemed to be living outside the law of God. (Petty theft and marital infidelity being the key transgressions they were picking up on.)