The average Muslim citizen of Western democracies could practice tabarra in simple, visually effective ways by discarding the type and colour of hijab now associated with Khomeinists, Taliban and IS, and rejecting beards of the style imposed by those movements. Last October IS published details of the size and shape of the beards it regards as perfectly Islamic. In Raqqa, IS’s de facto capital, agents from the Hasba (religious police) actually measure men’s beards in the streets and punish those who fail the test by caning them in public.

In Tehran, the Islamic chastity police declared in October that women must not infringe hijab rules even in their cars. In the first week of the new order being imposed more than 40,000 vehicles were confiscated because of such infringements. Television stations in Tehran and Raqqa ran footage of hijabs and beards on the streets of Washington, Paris, London and other Western capitals, as a sign of Islam’s triumph in the land of the infidel. (Communist China did something similar by showing films of Western youth wearing Mao-style clothes in the 1960s.) As the medieval Iranian poet Mahyar Dailami put it: “If you don’t think like them, don’t look like them!”

The next doll, the radical sleeper cells in Western cities, could be detected and uprooted by proper police work within the law. It may come as a surprise to some, but France does not have a special unit to combat terrorism; it has units to deal with “grand banditry” and organised crime. Terrorism is a particular kind of threat, especially terrorism built on a religious matrix, and so needs a specialised unit to deal with it.

In 1996, the G7 summit in Lyon, presided over by France’s then president Jacques Chirac, approved 45 measures to combat terrorism. None of them were put into effect. In the 1990s too, France spearheaded a global debate on how to fight terrorism, mainly by seeking joint action through the United Nations. However, the whole process got bogged down in a debate about how to define terrorism with the sick cliché that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter.” Twenty years and so many atrocities later in more than 30 countries in every continent, it is perhaps time for France and the European Union to persuade the UN to provide the international framework needed to combat terrorism based on the principle that one man’s terrorist is every man’s terrorist.

Finally, we come to the doll that represents IS. It is the easiest to face and defeat — provided its victims, among them almost all the Western democracies, really want to do so. Initially, IS appeared to be a spectacular success because it managed swiftly to conquer territory the size of the United Kingdom. But it did so largely because it faced no opposition. It moved into Raqqa after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s troops had fled. Many people think Assad wanted them to leave. IS then moved into Mosul and Ramadi in Iraq, again because local units of the Iraqi army, feeling no loyalty to a Shia-dominated government in Baghdad that discriminated against Arab Sunnis, didn’t see why they should fight. In fact, IS has fought two major battles, over Kobane in Syria and Sinjar in Iraq, and lost both to a coalition of Kurdish fighters.