Islamist gunmen committed mass murder at the paper’s Paris offices. They shot dead eight cartoonists and journalists, two police officers and two others, in a graphic demonstration of their hatred for freedom of speech and of the press. 

Then the great and the good of Western society committed a mass free-speech fraud. They sold us the line that they all supported free speech, making rhetorical and ritualistic gestures of support for the Charlie Hebdo victims. Yet at the same time, many were acting out their contempt for the real freedom of expression that allows such provocative publications to exist in the first place.

The massive ‘Je Suis Charlie’ demonstrations in Paris and many other cities, which followed the massacre and the connected murders at a Jewish supermarket, were uplifting displays of human solidarity that made an impression on us all. They also, however, gave a misleading impression of the state of play with free speech in Europe and America.

Here, it might have appeared, was a clear cultural divide: on one side, a free world united in support of Charlie Hebdo and freedom of expression; on the other, a handful of extremists opposed to liberty and ‘all that we hold dear’. Behind those solidarity banners, however, Western opinion was far less solidly for free speech. Many public figures could hardly wait to stop paying lip service to liberty and start adding the inevitable qualifications, obfuscations and, above all, ‘buts…’.

Those who took a dim view of genuinely free speech in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo were not confined to Islamist terror cells. It quickly emerged that the threat to freedom came not just from a few barbarians at the gate, but also from within the supposed citadel of civilisation itself.