On the day Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Britain’s first female Muslim Cabinet minister, declared Muslim prejudice and bigotry to have ‘passed the dinner table test’ in Britain, I became wittingly entangled in an Islamophobia debate which started off as an innocuous 9/11 joke which happened to appear on my Facebook wall after having been posted there by one of my funnier Facebook friends.

Like many Irish, Jewish, Pope, political, US President and similar style jokes, it wasn’t prize-winning or side-splittingly hilarious, but whatever it was, it was ultimately a joke and ought to have remained just that.

Within the hour, it was mysteriously removed and in its place lots of angry people had their say. Some considered the humour distasteful and tacky, calculated to foment racial hatred.

Meanwhile others seemed angrier that the poster had succumbed to pressure to erase it, in what they saw as a threat to freedom of expression, and more significantly, to the freedom to laugh at ourselves and each other.

I suppose I can’t really continue this without sharing the joke and letting you come to your own conclusions, so here it goes: “A friend put down a deposit on a Porsche‘ 911 and mentioned on Facebook that he couldn’t wait for his new 911 to arrive. Within minutes, 4,000 Muslims wanted to be friends with him.”

That was the long and short of it. To appreciate it, I suppose you’d have to be vaguely familiar with the way Facebook operates, particularly the way people, many you may have never met before, extend friendship requests and ask permission to befriend you.

That’s exactly what happens, and whenever it does, I am visited by the same sort of feelings I used to experience when shopping in north America, where I’d be hijacked by a salesperson I was sure I had never seen before, whose body language and conversation seemed to otherwise suggest we had shared an intimate dinner the night before.

I never really understood that part of Facebook – how people you don’t know, have never met or spoken to, feel this compelling urge to lay claim to your friendship. Yes, you can always ‘gently’ ignore the request or send the person a probing message back: “Do I know you? I didn’t think so. Are you stalking or spying on me?”

If, on the other hand, you’re terribly afraid of hurting peoples’ feelings or like to collect friends for whatever reason, you can confirm the request.

But back to the joke which you must know took me a few minutes to ‘get’. I know I am making a terrible mistake here and my honesty will definitely come back to haunt me. I will henceforth be labelled the columnist who wouldn’t know a joke if it came served on a bed of lettuce.

But then, I have always been unusual about humour – my creative mind works differently to others’. I sometimes ‘get’ jokes for the wrong reasons. I laugh at things that weren’t really meant to be part of the joke.

Within about two minutes, I had made the 911 connection and had it all figured out. But I found my delayed reaction particularly insightful. You see, what it did was demonstrate, above all to me, was that I don’t immediately associate 9/11 with the Muslim world. And that is actually pretty accurate and very significant.

Indeed, on a first reading of the joke, I was sure it was principally aimed at showing up the ostentation that is often synonymous with the Arab world. In the same way Jews are often associated with frugality, Arabs get the other end of the deal. You know, where most people have gardens or yards at the back of their homes, Arabs have oil refineries – that sort of thing.

So when I saw ‘Muslim’ and ‘Porsche’ in the same sentence, I imagined 4,000 Arabs driving Porsches along the Kings Road, with lots of Harrods and Louis Vuitton bags spilling out of the soft top. I momentarily dismissed the three digits which tell a completely different story. But I found my myopia very interesting to say the least.

And it prompted me to have my own say in the heated debate. And this is more or less what I said:

I didn’t find the joke at all offensive and I happen to know many Muslims who’d definitely share my sentiments. I reckon ‘taking offence’ is counterproductive and does Muslims the least favours of all in as much as it affords them a certain chip or inferiority complex which is most unfair to them and especially to the way others perceive them.

If someone ridicules George Bush or any of the American presidents, no one rushes to take offence, because America and its presidents consider themselves superior. So not only can they handle the flak, they rise above it, celebrate it and make it work to their advantage.

I find walking on eggshells and the constant fear that we are going to upset the politically correct apple-cart very tiring. If I were Muslim, it’s the post mortems not the joke that would have bothered me.

We have no qualms taking the mickey out of healthy, white, heterosexual Caucasian males but God forbid you joke about blacks, the blind, the disabled, or women.

Yes, ladies, in our zeal to stand up and be counted we have rendered ourselves a chippy minority group.

The ability to laugh is not tantamount to mockery and in no way renders the joke’s recipient inferior – it actually has the opposite effect. The day we can all tell after-dinner jokes about one other – blacks, whites, bi-racials, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, men and yes, even women and the arcane offside rule, which I have absolutely no desire to master, and just laugh out loud without reading too deeply into anything, is the day we will truly have passed the dinner table test.

Would someone please pass the salt?

michelaspiteri@gmail.com