The Europeans are baffling. What is an Arab who studies Europe supposed to make of a continent where the Swiss foreign minister this week was condemned in her own country for the courtesy of wearing a veil when she visited her Iranian counterpart?

At the same time the Danes deliberately reprint those controversial cartoons on the Prophet Muhammad? What is to be made of a Europe in which France firmly opposes Turkish membership of the EU? But at the same time France does almost nothing to control an immigration flow that now has some 6 million people of Muslim origin from North and West Africa in the country? The main difference would seem to be that the Turks, if they joined the EU, would (unlike France's illegal immigrants) do so legally and meeting all the qualifications of democracy and free institutions that the EU requires.

And what is the logic of France, which is almost wholly reliant on nuclear power, seeking naval basing facilities in the Persian Gulf, when it is less dependent on imported oil than any other advanced industrial economy? Many Arabs will recall that Germany within living memory tried to exterminate the Jewish people. But this week Chancellor Angela Merkel was an honored guest in Israel, addressing the Knesset and vowing that her country "would never abandon Israel."

Just what do the Europeans stand for and what do they really think? Do they still consider themselves a Christian culture, even though the European Union decided against any such reference in their new constitutional treaty? Are they American pawns or America's critics and economic rival? It is not easy for an outsider to tell. One well-known Arab reacted to all this by concluding that the Danish cartoons and the whole European approach confirmed his suspicion that it was all part of a deep and subtle anti-Islamic plot hatched by Pope Benedict.

This came in the framework of a new crusade in which the Pope of the Vatican has played a large, lengthy role, declared Osama bin Laden in his latest tape message. This naturally triggered an intense security alert at the Vatican as the pope prepares to celebrate Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the holiest weekend in the Christian calendar. The response will be what you see and not what you hear, and let our mothers bereave us if we do not make victorious our messenger of God, bin Laden went on, which sounds like an open threat on the pope.

The reality is that there is no single European view, just the discordant chaos of views and ideals and prejudices that emerge in democracies. But one value to which almost all Europeans cling is freedom of speech, whether that of bin Laden to spout conspiratorial nonsense or of Danish cartoonists to hold nothing sacred. Along with it goes freedom of religion, for mosques to be built across Europe and for the pope to celebrate a mass this Sunday for a resurrection in which only a minority of Europeans still believe.