You would never guess it from the hatred it inspired, but only 4 per cent of Hebdo covers featured Islam. The satirists’ stock targets were the French National Front and the Catholic Church. But, as Fourest says, how could Hebdo use a cover picture of the Pope when Islamists were threatening to impose religious law in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, or were beheading people in Syria? And, she might have also asked, where lay the bravery in savaging the beliefs of Catholics who would not  murder you or anyone else while giving a pass to Islamists who would do both?

The cartoons themselves were mild by the savage standards of French satire. To take one example, intellectuals and journalists said during the Arab Spring that there was no need to worry because “moderate Islamists” would come to the fore. Charlie Hebdo replied by asking what moderate Sharia would look like: stoning to death using fair-trade rocks? A religious law authorising homosexuality but forcing gays to wear the veil? For that, its offices were firebombed.

Although Fourest has many criticisms of French intellectuals, she reserves a special scorn for Anglo-Saxon journalists. Fourest describes an encounter between her friend and ally Fiammetta Venner and a “particularly vehement” BBC presenter. The BBC man damned her for failing to respect the taboo on producing likenesses of Muhammad. Venner replied that if he was so keen on respecting everything that is prohibited by Islam then he should also remove all the crucifixes and pictures of Jesus in churches in England, given that Jesus is also considered a prophet of Islam and that according to the Koran the crucifixion never took place. “The presenter thought he’d found the way to keep the peace, namely by respecting the taboos of each community. There was just one detail he had forgotten: the beliefs of some are nearly always considered blasphemous by others.”

After the November attacks on Paris, I doubt that these attitudes can continue. Europe’s free pass from the global terror wars feels as if it has reached its expiry date. It is impossible to see the future, but the relative peace that produced appeasement has been broken twice in Paris alone in 2015. If the assaults continue, we should look back on the years after 9/11 with some shame. Western countries fought radical Islamists with the most advanced weapons systems the human race has invented. They broke human rights law and the rules of war with a prison camp at Guantánamo Bay. They engaged in torture to an extent that even hardened observers found shocking. But they would not fight the religious ideas that inspired their enemies for fear of seeming insensitive, Islamophobic or racist.

To duck arguments while starting wars was the most extraordinary inversion of priorities. Instead of encouraging Muslims to break with extremism, we left liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims isolated. We adopted the language of the extremists, and censored the very arguments they needed to use against fundamentalism. Instead of damning religious totalitarianism, we invented rationales that obscured rather than enlightened.