When cartoonist Garry Trudeau was scheduled to receive a Polk Award at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus on April 10, it hardly seemed worth covering.

Everyone could easily predict exactly what he’d say: Cartoonist receives award for his political bravery, defends free speech against demagogues, offers salute to Charlie Hebdo victims. Etc.

Except that’s not what happened: Trudeau used his entire speech to reflect upon the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and took the side of the terrorists. Those rogue cartoonists? They had it coming for engaging in “hate speech.” Their cartoons were just “graffiti.” And didn’t they once fire a guy for making anti-Semitic remarks? Hypocrites!

In the words of columnist Mark Steyn, “The Polk Award is named after a journalist shot dead at point-blank range in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war. So you might have thought it would be in ever so mildly bad taste to use the opportunity of a Polk acceptance speech to piss on the graves of a group of journalists similarly murdered.”

“Free expression,” declared Trudeau, “becomes its own kind of fanaticism.”

It’s a line that he will carry to his grave. One that will outlive anything he ever wrote in his strip Doonesbury. A fuller quotation is even more stunning in its moral obtuseness.

“What free-speech absolutists have failed to acknowledge,” he said, “is that because one has the right to offend a group does not mean that one must. Or that that group gives up the right to be outraged. They’re allowed to feel pain. Freedom should always be discussed within the context of responsibility. At some point free expression absolutism becomes childish and unserious. It becomes its own kind of fanaticism.”

He concluded, “It’s not easy figuring out where the red line is for satire anymore. But it’s always worth asking this question: Is anyone, anyone at all, laughing? If not, maybe you crossed it.”

Pre-massacre, Charlie Hebdo had a paid circulation of 60,000. Someone was laughing.

Trudeau can’t picture himself or his friends reading Charlie Hebdo, so he thinks no one else must be reading it either. That Olympian inability to peer down through the cloud cover that separates the super-elite from ordinary people is death to the comic sense.

Is it any wonder than you never hear anyone talk about Doonesbury anymore? When I was at Yale in the 1980s the cartoonist’s name was frequently the first one mentioned when the subject of distinguished alumni came up. I doubt today’s Yale students even know his name.

Trudeau is correct when he says satire should punch up, not down. But fanatical Islam is not a homeless guy begging for spare change in a doorway. Islamism is a mighty, well-funded, global menace whose murderous arms extend from Kandahar Province to Boylston Street. Islamism is the world’s leading threat to peace, democracy, women’s rights, gay emancipation and, yes, free expression. It is the single most terrifying force on Earth.

Charlie Hebdo didn’t claim Muslims “gave up the right to be outraged.” They can be outraged if they want. What they may not do, if they want to be considered part of the civilized world, is attack people in response.

“Free expression becomes its own kind of fanaticism”? If you say, “I hope the Yankees destroy the Mets tonight,” you’re a kind of fanatic. But not quite the same kind as the suicide bomber who says, “I hope I destroy a lot of infidels tonight.”

In 45 years as a satirist, Trudeau hasn’t figured out the distinction the rest of us made on the playground. Sticks and stones and AK-47s and sneaker bombs and flaming underwear may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.

As cartoonist Nate Beeler told The Washington Post, “I can tell you that you’ll never see me draw a cartoon about Garry Trudeau being savagely beheaded by free-speech absolutists.”

One side demands the freedom to speak. The other seeks to kill. These two sides are not close to being moral equivalents. Oh, and firing a guy for anti-Semitic jokes is not like murdering him.

“Because one has the right to offend a group does not mean that one must” is a literally true statement, but a puzzling one. Does Trudeau think that the Charlie Hebdo editors wanted a law mandating that everyone offend a Muslim?

Yet the Charlie Hebdo editors knew that we could, if we had their guts, neutralize Islamism with our wits. If every newspaper and art gallery and movie studio distributed an image of Muhammad — if, indeed, they merely mocked Islam as much as they mocked Christianity — jihadists would have to bow to the reality that they lack the resources to murder everyone involved.

They would have to recognize that their rage is directed at modernity itself. They’d have to wake up from their beautiful dreams of 72-virgin orgies and notice that they’re living in the 21st century.