These were only some of the attacks that happened in the period from 2005 onwards. But there were many more to come. On 7 January 2015 the assassins got lucky at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, managed to get past the building’s security, kill the bodyguards assigned by the state to protect the editor, and massacred most of the editorial team in their place of work. As well as years of threats to their lives for depicting the Prophet of Islam, the editors of Charlie Hebdo had also spent years being dragged through the French courts by the Muslim organisations of France. The month after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo – on 15 February – a meeting in support of the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks that convened in Copenhagen was attacked by a 22-year-old Danish-born gunman. As with the Paris attacks the previous month, the killing spree began with the cartoonists and ended up at a Jewish site – in Paris at a kosher supermarket, in Copenhagen at a synagogue.

There seemed to be no end in sight to such legal and physical attacks and so nobody flinched in 2015 at a passing mention in a piece in The Atlantic magazine to ‘Europe’s endless, debilitating blasphemy wars’.2 Despite a couple of decades of warning, from the Rushdie affair onwards, no one in any position of authority or power had predicted this wave of events. No one who had opened up the borders of Europe to mass migration from the third world had ever thought about it as a Muslim issue. No one had prepared for the possibility that those arriving might not only not become integrated but might bring many social and religious views with them, and that other minorities might be the first victims of such lack of foresight. No one in a position of influence had expected that an upsurge in immigration would lead to an increase in anti-Semitism and gay-bashing. No one who had ever nodded through the lax immigration policies had ever predicted the emergence of Muslim blasphemy as one of the major cultural and security issues of twenty-first-century Europe. All those who had warned about it had either been ignored, defamed, dismissed, prosecuted or killed. Rarely, if ever, even after the facts changed, did the actual victims receive much sympathy.

What mainstream politicians and much of the media had in fact done, right up to and throughout the 2000s, was encourage a sense that the people in Europe who were shouting ‘fire’ were the actual arsonists. Efforts to silence the people who raised their voice – whether through violence, intimidation or the courts – meant that three decades after the Rushdie affair there was almost no one in Europe who would dare write a novel, compose a piece of music or even draw an image that might risk Muslim anger. Indeed, they ran in the other direction. Politicians and almost everybody else went out of their way to show how much they admired Islam.