But when Kerry and those like him looked at their bodies closely perhaps they noticed that appearances deceived. They were not like the rest of us, after all. Hypercacher was a kosher supermarket and the dead were Jews. Few people were prepared to say what they were thinking openly, but a BBC reporter, Tim Willcox, showed no restraint. A Jewish woman in the crowd near the crime scene told him, “The situation is going back to the days of 1930s in Europe. Jews are the target now.” Willcox could not let the suggestion that Jews were innocent victims go unchallenged. “Many critics of Israel’s policy would suggest that Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands,” he said, interrupting her.

If you were a Jew, it was Israel’s fault that you were murdered, and possibly your fault too for not trying to pass as a gentile, or avoiding synagogues, and Jewish shops and restaurants, or changing your name and ditching your kippah.

If you are a freethinker satirising Islam, you are a “this” and there is a “rationale” to your murder. If you are Jewish, you are a “that” and there is a “rationale” to your murders too. Most people in the rich world are not satirists or Jews. They are neither “this” nor “that”. Indeed most satirists, who boast of their iconoclasm, are very careful never to become a “this” or a “that”. For all their poses as courageous men and women who tell it like it is, they do not follow Hebdo and mock targets who might respond by shooting them dead.

Open-minded liberals thus found the lesson of the Hebdo attacks was clear and surprisingly reassuring: the only people in danger were a few satirists “who went too far” and Jews who carried a new version of their ancient curse. The rest of the West could find a modus vivendi, a chance for life in the midst of death. “OK,” they thought, “terrorists are really angry because of this and that. But we are neither ‘this’ nor ‘that’ and the Islamist ‘other’ won’t harm us.”

The comforting illusion did not last more than 10 months. As even Kerry acknowledged, the mass murders in Paris on November 13 showed that it was not just satirists or Jews in the firing line but everybody and anybody. Islamic State targeted young fans at a rock concert, diners eating at restaurants, and spectators at a football game.

I have written before that the period after 9/11 has been a strange and neurotic time in Europe and North America. On the one hand, everyone knew that a murderously reactionary ideology mandated vast slaughter. On the other, actual Islamist slaughters were rare. Until the two assaults on Paris this year, there were just two large attacks since 9/11 on the rich world: in Madrid and London in 2004 and 2005. Fear of violence without the experience of violence produces the ideal conditions for appeasement. You can imagine your own deaths and the deaths of those you love. But death never comes. You are not provoked into retaliation, but instead are overwhelmed by the desire to avoid danger by excusing and indulging. No one in Pakistan or Nigeria could engage in the wishful thinking of John Kerry. Only the nervous peace of a phoney war could produce the thought that we could have it all ways. We could carry on being good liberals respecting the rights of women and homosexuals, believing in freedom of speech and of religion, while conceding miles of ground to men who were against every liberal and democratic principle we avowed. As much as the admirable and essential desire to prevent our fellow citizens suffering anti-Muslim bigotry, as much as the narcissistic desire to indulge in Western guilt, the basic desire to save our skins and calm our fears has shaped contemporary culture.