It’s about how the fear of appearing Islamophobic has led people to stifle their discomfort with Islamic practices, like the wearing of the ‘total, all-encompassing veil’ (which I have a problem with) or the spread of ham-free restaurants (which I’m more chilled out about). And it’s about how this chilling of discussion around Islam encourages a climate of mutual apprehension and tension in European communities, where non-Muslims are implicitly told to keep their concerns to themselves while Muslims increasingly come to live in a kind of protective bubble of non-criticism or just non-discussion. It says this is bad for community life. I think that’s a good point.

Where the editorial says that something like the bombings in Brussels could not happen ‘without everyone’s contribution’, it is not, as the anti-Charlie crowd claims, saying that all Muslims are to blame for that attack. Indeed, the editorial castigates ‘xenophobes [who] blame immigration’ for terrorism. On the contrary, it is explicitly arguing that European society itself, our culture, not Muslims, has helped to nurture such terrorism by encouraging ‘the fear of contradiction or objection’ and an ‘aversion to causing controversy’.

It says the bombers’ taxi-ride to the airport in Brussels was ‘but a last step in a journey of rising anxiety’, a bloody, violent expression of a ‘preceding atmosphere of mute and general apprehension’. The bombers’ role, it says, is to provide ‘the end of a philosophical line already begun’, a line which says ‘Hold your tongues… Give up discussing, debating, contradicting or contesting.’ In other words, Islamist terrorism in Europe is a violent expression of the culture of self-censorship and community fragmentation, which encourages some people to see themselves as victimised and their critics as pure evil. Again, I think this is a good point. If anything, the editorial is blaming 21st-century European moral sheepishness and cowardice for terrorism, not Muslims, the majority of whom ‘do nothing wrong’.