I am tired of having to defend bad things. Yet apparently one must, once someone bans them. Taslima Nasreen could perhaps be the most awful writer to emerge out of the Bengali-speaking world, but we all bought her book anyway, to show we were free-speech fans. The Satanic Verses was Salman Rushdie’s most unreadable book, but we all did our best to plod through it to show how very liberal we were. This week, as we effortlessly turned an unknown, puerile cartoonist with no sense of humour and dubious drawing skills into a bearded messiah of free speech, I decided that enough was enough. I am no longer going to engage in discussion about the quality and nature of work that gets banned or censored or attacked. Because it’s irrelevant.