Al-Qaeda militants were early adopters of cancel culture, of raging against that which gives offence. Again, this outlook appeared to come less from the external world of realpolitik, of interests and aims, and more from the internal world of feeling and sentiment. It was not surprising when al-Zawahiri, who appears to have been al-Qaeda’s chief No Platformer, celebrated the assault on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Indeed, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), of which al-Zawahiri was leader, claimed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo attack. Al-Zawahiri made a statement shortly after the attack, describing it as payback for the blasphemers, as a just attack on ‘immoral Westerners who left their Christianity and assaulted the Prophet of Islam’. I have argued before that the two mass murderers who carried out the assault on Charlie Hebdo were essentially ‘the armed wing of political correctness’, seeking to punish, to cancel, those who hurt their feelings. This was a theme developed by al-Zawahiri himself in the years before the Charlie Hebdo massacre – the need to censor, with violence if necessary, those who seek to erase our identity.

That al-Qaeda leaders moved from organising the worst terrorist attack in history to issuing statements about Muslims’ hurt feelings or riding on the coattails of smaller-scale attacks like the one at Charlie Hebdo can of course be seen as a sign of how defeated, how shrivelled, their movement had become in the years after 9/11. The ‘war on terror’ undoubtedly reduced al-Qaeda’s capacity to organise terror events. At the same time, though, there is a logical flow from the apocalypticism of 9/11 to the cheerleading for the Charlie Hebdo attack, from al-Qaeda’s use of unprecedented terroristic violence in New York and Washington, DC to its angry, finger-wagging statements about ‘malicious’ Westerners who insult Islam. In all cases, we were witnessing a therapeutic deployment of violence and threats; a use of terrorism not to effect certain ends or to make gains in the political universe, but rather to express an amorphous, often unnamed sense of grievance against societies that are viewed as uncaring, insulting, hurtful.