"There is no more Molly." Or Luz.

But, one by one, our freedom does get murdered. I don’t begrudge Luz his wish to “regain control of my life”. To be the lone survivor because you were running late is a blessing but also a curse and a burden. So there is no more Molly, and no more Luz, and no more Lars – not since the post-Charlie attack on Lars Vilks’ free-speech event in Copenhagen forced into hiding a splendidly brave artist who had borne the weight of his courage alone for too many years.

Until the 21st-century Islamization of the west got underway, there was a modest but long established tradition in western art of depicting Mohammed. He is shown in Dante’s Inferno – in hell, with his entrails hanging out. And any number of artists from Giovanni da Modena to Salvador Dali have offered their own renderings of the scene. He appears carrying a sword and the Koran with Moses, Confucius, Hammurabi and other law-givers in Adolph Weinman’s frieze at the US Supreme Court, although since the Council on American-Islamic Relations complained about it the Court’s official position is that, yes, that’s Moses and Confucius and the rest of the gang up there but this is just some bloke who “bears no resemblance to Mohammed”.

One day that excuse will no longer suffice, and the frieze will be hacked apart. Already representations of Mohammed in western art galleries are being carted off to the basement. In the near future, if your local library still carries an edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, it won’t be with William Blake’s or Gustav Doré’s illustrations of Mohammed in the torments of hell.

In Dante’s day (circa 1315) and Weinman’s day (1935), Muslims who disliked depictions of Mohammed did not generally slaughter artists, writers and publishers. That changed with the Danish cartoons. Once they started killing people for drawing Mohammed it became necessary for everyone to draw Mohammed – to show that there are too many to kill, and thus to teach Islam that, whatever its own proscriptions, they do not and will never apply to non-believers. Once you make drawing Mohammed a capital crime, it is necessary to make drawing Mohammed so universal that it’s no crime at all. If you claim the right to kill because you’re offended, then it is necessary to offend you all the time – until you accept the messy norms of pluralistic societies.