Valentina Calà/flickr forum Charlie Hebdo waves the white flag The Muslim prophet, Muhammad, will be mocked no more.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, a period clotted with jingoistic language, one phrase hardened into cliche faster than any other: if we don’t go shopping, forge ahead with baseball’s World Series, maintain an uninterrupted broadcast schedule for the Late Show With David Letterman and Saturday Night Live, or if we alter our lives in any significant way, then the terrorists have won.

That cliched bit of ‘keep calm and carry on’ sanctimony quickly devolved into a cliched joke, with the terrorists mocked endlessly alongside platitudes about Al Qaeda hating us for our freedom and admonitions that we only stuff our mouths full of “freedom fries.”

But let us briefly reanimate that expression and acknowledge that in one important battle — the battle over free speech — the terrorists have indeed won. And let’s also acknowledge that it was psychopathic violence, not a sense of propriety and consideration for those down and out in Paris and Clichy-sous-Bois, that helped achieve this victory.

Last week, in an interview with German newsweekly Stern, Charlie Hebdo editor-in-chief Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau waved a white flag, stained with the blood of 12 murdered colleagues and comrades, when announcing that he would no longer draw cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. It was clear that Charlie Hebdo — of which Riss owns 40 percent — was also done with Muhammad mockery. This comes just a few months after cartoonist Renald “Luz” Luzier said that drawing Muhammad “no longer interested” him. He quit Charlie Hebdo not long after. The editor of Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten was more forthcoming about why he too was done with the prophet. As the newspaper that kicked off the “Muhammad cartoon crisis” in 2005, Jyllands-Posten would not be republishing anything from Charlie Hebdo, he stated bluntly, because the staff feared a repeat of the the massacre in Paris.

This is an entirely understandable surrender to violence, though disappointingly one that is cloaked in euphemism.

Let’s be perfectly clear: this is an entirely understandable surrender to violence, though disappointingly one that is cloaked in euphemism. While Islam was far down on the list of Charlie Hebdo’s satire targets, Sourisseau told Stern that he wants to prevent people from thinking his magazine “was possessed by Islam.” And it was time to move on, he said, because “we've done our job [and] we have defended the right to caricature.”

Now the blunt attacks on Islamism — never on Muslims — regularly offered by the magazine’s murdered editor Stéphane Charbonnier have been replaced with the platitudes of its critics. “The mistakes you could blame Islam for can be found in other religions,” Sourisseau told Stern. I suspect he knows that this isn’t exactly true, especially in the era of the Islamic State. After all, the Charlie Hebdo offices weren’t bombed and sprayed with bullets by dyspeptic papists, and neither Riss or Luz have suggested that they’ll no longer draw Jesus. But this is the line we must all take now — even left-wing, French secular humanists — to insulate ourselves from charges of bigotry.

The relentless campaign against Charlie Hebdo by those accusing it of “racism” or “punching down” has had an effect. Because once deployed, as the surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo discovered, the racism charge sticks to the accused's skin like napalm. And no one is immune — even murdered cartoonists — because there are no penalties for filing a false report. So if they expected unmitigated solidarité after their staff was machine gunned (while planning their participation, it should be noted, in an anti-racism event), they were surely disappointed when non-Francophone writers who hadn’t previously heard of Charlie exploded with denunciations of its racist intent. The most profane mainstream examples compared staffers with raping colonialists and genocidal Nazis.

When the American franchise of PEN, a literary association devoted to the defense of free speech, bestowed an award on Charlie Hebdo celebrating it’s courage, over 200 members revolted, conflating the magazine’s attacks on religious fanatics with attacks on average French Muslims, a group “already marginalized, embattled, and victimized.” (One PEN dissenter, novelist Randa Jarrar, demonstrated her grasp of the subject matter when she referred to “Charlie Hebdo” as a person who had unconvincingly denied “his” racism.)

So the magazine’s criticism of fundamentalism was neutered by both Islamist gunmen and Jello-spined members of the vulgar and stupid “I Am Not Charlie” brigades, who expressed zero interest in the killers’ ideology but an inordinate interest in the ideology of Charlie Hebdo’s editors. The magazine was even defamed by famous cartoonists, including Doonsbury creator Garry Trudeau who blamed the Charlie Hebdo staffers for their own murders, writing that “the decisions they made [to draw Muhammad]...brought a world of pain to France.”

And now that Charlie Hebdo has given up on Muhammad, under threats of continued violence, we are no longer Charlie. Indeed, it’s little surprise that the Sourisseau announcement received depressingly little media attention. In a world of hashtag activism, almost six months after the Je Suis Charlie Facebook profile images have been swapped for rainbow flags, we’ve moved on to moaning about skint Greeks, prepubescent royals making stiff-armed Nazi salutes, and a blustering billionaire pretending to run for president.

The first post-massacre issue edition of Charlie Hebdo featured a Muslim (possibly Muhammad the prophet, possibly an ordinary Muslim named Muhammad) holding a sign that read “Tout est pardonné” — all is forgiven. It was tender and affecting, and a declaration that the remaining staff wouldn’t be cowed by violence. But many newspapers refused then — and still refuse — to run it. As Riss told Stern, “we are expected to exercise a freedom of expression that no one dares to.” In other words, amongst the media classes, Je Suis Charlie was pointless bumper sticker solidarity.

So one can't begrudge Riss and Luz and all the other survivors at Charlie Hebdo the decision to go soft on those who most demand mockery and derision. But we should begrudge those in media who shrugged at the assassin's veto, claiming they couldn’t publish satirical cartoons out of respect for religion, for whom Je Suis Charlie was merely social media signaling.

And of course, on the radical fringe, all isn’t forgiven. Just last week French police arrested three French residents planning to behead a military official and post the gruesome results on the Internet. The plot was to be executed on the one-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo killings.

Not long after those killings, former Charlie Hebdo editor Philippe Val suggested that the magazine was destined to change, to go soft, as a result of the attacks. It provoked the fury of his former colleague. "The terrorists did not win," Luz insisted, despite his recent decision to retire from drawing Muhammad.

I wish it were true, but with the previous staff of Charlie Hebdo dead, the current crop declaring Muhammad off limits, and the Danish newspaper that started it all also out of the cartoon game, it looks very much like Luz is wrong.

I’ll revive the cliché one last time: The terrorists have won.

Michael Moynihan is a writer in New York.

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