One route to an answer would be to consider what if anything might be said or done by ‘ordinary’ people who object to the mass immigration into their societies and some of the negative consequences that this brings with it. What would a decent movement that expressed such concerns look like? Would it be allowed to have any working-class people? Ought everybody involved to have university degrees, or are non-university-educated people allowed to have concerns about the direction their country is headed in without being ‘Nazis’? In 2014 Chancellor Merkel could have started such a process herself. Instead of using her New Year message to condemn Pegida for having coldness in their hearts, she could instead have told the German people that the Salafists and other radicals to whom Pegida professed themselves opposed have the most appalling coldness in their hearts – a problem for which Germans must find an answer without themselves in turn shunning all the world’s refugees. It was the same with the response of the German political establishment to the recently created Alternative für Deutschland. Concentrating on attacking the AfD’s views and supporters while massively increasing the causes of their concerns was a deeply short-term policy. Yet attacking all expressions of concern and failing to address or in any way stem the cause of them – to attack the secondary problem and not the primary problem – became a European habit in these years, and a sign of significant further problems to come.

The mainstream European media has the same affliction. Having internalised the Rushdie fatwa, the Danish cartoons and Charlie Hebdo lessons as much if not more than anyone, Europe’s media know that alone among subjects there is a physical as well as reputational risk to delving into Islamic matters. While they hide behind ‘good taste’ defences on such issues, all the time there are easier themes for them to revert to. The ‘rise of the far-right’ in particular is such a trope in journalism that the far-right is said to be rising even when it is collapsing, as it did in Britain during the last decade. Nevertheless the powerful trope is often given further colour, such as when the right or far right are also said to be ‘on the march’. The headline claim that ‘The far right is on the march across Europe’ has been used promiscuously in recent years, whether the people in question are right wing or not. As the writer Mark Steyn pointed out at the time of the rise of Pim Fortuyn in 2002, ‘Gay professors on the march’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it.1