While Geller guards free speech’s wild frontier, over in the blue states the PEN writers surrender disputed territory without a fight. All of them called the Charlie Hebdo massacre, in Peter Carey’s words, a “hideous crime”. None of them mentioned the associated murders of Jews at the Hyper Cacher supermarket. Rachel Kushner accused Charlie Hebdo of “cultural intolerance” and promoting “a kind of forced secular view’, which is kind of hypocritical of her. Carey denounced PEN for ignoring “the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognise its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population”. Teju Cole called himself a “free-speech fundamentalist”, but wanted to fill PEN’s “headspace” with “more progressive” causes, like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and “the awful effects of government spying in the US”.

Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway would call the PEN Six “a rotten crowd”. Issuing a trigger warning about an organisation that protects their freedom of expression, and publicises the persecution of less fortunate writers abroad, they bit the hand that feeds, and shot themselves in the foot. They seem not to understand that France’s constitutional laïcité is the European sibling of America’s constitutional neutrality. Unfamiliarity breeds contempt, and provinciality.

“If PEN as a free speech organisation cannot defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures,” Salmon Rushdie said, “then frankly the organisation is not worth the name. What I would say to Peter, Michael, and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them.” Yet Rushdie did not comment on Garland, where people were nearly “murdered for drawing pictures”. Nor did PEN’s president, Andrew Solomon, extend to Geller his defence of Charlie Hebdo: “There is courage in refusing the very idea of forbidden statements.”

Emerson called politics “a government of bullies, tempered by editors”, but the editors led the bullying of Geller. An unsigned editorial in the New York Times attacked Geller’s “provocative” behavior. The Harvard law professor Noah Feldman suggested that Geller had “deliberately” provoked the assault; if so, she was “morally culpable” for her attackers’ deaths.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” Fitzgerald wrote in The Crack-Up, “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” The depiction of Muhammad, and the application of standard critical methods to the history of Islam, have become test cases for the practice of Western freedoms, and the capacity of states to protect their citizens. It is possible to assert the right of speech without falling into Geller’s strategy of contempt or the PEN writers’ trahison des clercs. When editors vacillated over reprinting Charlie Hebdo cartoons, Timothy Garton Ash made a first-rate suggestion: to create an independent website, on which all media could publish the cartoons simultaneously. Without such a mechanism, terrorists will define the bounds of free speech.