Second, previous terror attacks had precise political aims and were done to force changes to French foreign policy. The 2015 attacks, however, were not designed to obtain any concessions from the French state. The terrorists’ intention was simply to kill as many people as possible. Parisians had to die not because of what their government did or didn’t do but simply because of who they were.

That important point was spelt out by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the “Supreme Guide” of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in an “Open Letter to the Youth of the West” published on November 30, 2015. Khamenei wrote: “In the modern era the West, using advanced instruments [sic] has insisted on global cultural uniformalisation of the world. I regard the imposition of Western culture on [other] nations and the humiliation of independent cultures [by the West] as devastating and silent violence. Humiliating other cultures and insulting the most sacred of their content [i.e. religion] is the work of a culture that has absolutely no capability for replacing them. Even in the West itself the emergence of aggressiveness and loose-living as the principal ingredients of the dominant culture is leading to its rejection. We ask: is it a sin to reject your aggressive, cheap and nihilistic culture?” Khamenei went on to claim that IS represents a violent reaction based on “a Bedouin desert ideology” to colonialism, Zionism and American hegemony.

In other words, while the politically correct elites in the West pooh-pooh the theory of a clash of civilisations, Iran’s spiritual leader puts it at the centre of his analysis.

President François Hollande has extended the state of emergency imposed immediately after the November attacks by three months, increased the budget of the security services, brought 10,000 troops to Paris and given the green light to a series of arrests that would have enraged the politically correct before the latest attacks. He is also claims to have a strategy to deal with the threat posed by IS, one he has tried to sell to his Russian, American and British counterparts.

However, before one can talk of what to do, it is important to decide what not to do. The first item on the not-to-do list is precisely what Hollande and Valls have done, albeit in a number of asides rather than full statements — to assert that this is not Islam. Since many Muslims think otherwise, it would be more prudent for French leaders not to pose as arbiters of what is and what is not Islam.

The attacks in Paris were designed to massacre as many people as possible. If we use Russian matryoshka dolls, in which dolls nest within each other, as a metaphor, the smallest of the dolls represents the Paris killers. The next biggest doll, within which the first nests, is the network of radical Islamist groups that have taken root throughout France and, indeed, in all the Western democracies. The third doll is the Muslim community in non-Muslim societies. It may not even know what is nesting inside it but, perhaps without wanting to, it provides the society needed for radical groups to flourish. In Maoist terms, it amounts to the water in which the militant “fish” thrive.