There has been a sudden jolt in an otherwise slow-motion smashing together of Europe's cultural tectonic plates. It started with the publishing, then reprinting, of cartoons satirising Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. Hotheads of every hue fanned the fire. The media reduced the story to the cross-cultural equivalent of West Side Story meets Gunfight at the OK Corral: prissy, passive-aggressive free-speech hooligans, against the more obviously alarming, somewhat feral, religious nuts. Taking sides is more fun than thinking. The inconvenient truth, however, is that many Muslims backed the Danes' right to free speech while many non-Muslims considered the cartoons an irresponsible abuse of that right. The Danish newspaper editor who first published the cartoons clearly had no idea what he was getting into. He would have gone into print with the irrefutable truth behind him that satire is a legitimate European way to express the otherwise inexpressible. Indeed, in line with Voltaire's assertion, 'I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it', satire is a liberty that represents an escape from dogmatic ignorance to tolerant enlightenment that is a definitive episode in European history. Satire involves incongruity and makes you laugh at what might otherwise make you anxious - such as a lit fuse attached to the Prophet's bomb-shaped turban. It is a way of rebelling against harsh truths and allowing the repressed drives of life and death to escape harmlessly. Sigmund Freud called it a mutual willingness to forsake the 'reality principle' for the 'pleasure principle'. One cartoon, in which martyrs ascending to heaven are told by the Prophet that virgins are running short, combines two standard devices. It makes fun of our fear of suicide bombers while giving us an excuse to think about sex, with all the permutations of titillation contained in the notion of having sex with a virgin while dead. All humour tends to the subversive because it suddenly shoots us above the earnest and the grave. At the moment we laugh, nothing and nobody can touch us. However, satire goes beyond low-voltage rebellion. It is a spear-headed attack. A satirist's choice of target, itself, is seeking confrontation, tolerance of which varies across cultures. Chinese tend to find it pointless and distasteful. Here, we had an attack against a religious group that has fragile and highly combustible relations with virtually everyone, including themselves. Not, perhaps, the ideal time to tease them. The most effective satire depends on the satirist identifying completely with his prey. Jonathan Swift, in his satirical masterpiece Gulliver's Travels, lampooned his own. So it was disingenuous for newspaper editors to pretend not to know the difference between attacking an in-group and an out-group, as psychologists call them. Ridiculing politicians who belong to the ruling cultural clan is not the same as lampooning the relatively powerless. I had a lesson in the subject on moving to New York where, due to my skin colour and accent, I had honorary membership in the confidently self-satisfied Wasp (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) class. I found the potshots that could be fired freely at me had to be more measured when the target was a Puerto Rican or even a Jew. It could be argued that the satirical attack itself was proof of acceptance. Violent outrage could be seen as a rejection of prevailing values and thus challenging them. Burning a nation's flag over a cartoon, however rude, is a tad over the top. Either way, it is not the cartoons or the flag-burning that matters. It is the conversation that follows. Jean Nicol looks at everyday issues from the point of view of a psychologist everydaypsychologist@yahoo.com