Appeasement and apologies will not save you.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

“Other prophets have followers with a sense of humour”.

That was how it began seven years ago. Everyone Draw Mohammed Day had spread over the internet. And with it came the death threats. Molly Norris, who got it all started, soon had to go into hiding.

The South African cartoonist Zapiro decided to draw Mohammed on a psychiatrist’s couch. “Other prophets have followers with a sense of humour,” Mohammed complains. A newspaper on a coffee table in the clouds carries headlines about Everyone Draw Mohammed Day and Jihadist fatwas.

Jonathan Shapiro, the leftist cartoonist behind Zapiro, quickly found out that Mohammed’s followers really don’t have a sense of humor. Threats such as “You’ve got to watch your back” and “This will cost him his life” came pouring in.

Shapiro met with Muslim leaders and tried to establish his bona fides. He hated Israel and the “Islamophobia of the US War on Terror”. Not to mention European Burka bans and the “juvenile Islamophobic Facebook campaign”. He wasn’t one of those wicked Islamophobes. He was a good lefty.

“In South Africa, here Muslims are empowered,” Shapiro complained to the same imaginary psychiatrist in another comic strip “Muslim clerics told me this week they’re all for Freedom of Expression… except for drawing the prophet. Making exceptions for Religious Censorship is hard for a cartoonist.”

Shapiro had missed the point. In Islam, religion is politics and politics is religion. Supporting Islamic empowerment means endorsing theocratic censorship. To mock Mohammed is to undermine the supremacist foundations of Islamist theocracy. And that challenges Islamic power.

The apologies didn’t help. The appeasement didn’t matter. They still wanted him dead.

The Muslim terrorists who plotted to kill Shapiro didn’t care that he would go on to make amends by drawing a deranged Netanyahu brandishing a nuclear missile and compare Israel’s bombing of Hamas Jihadists to Guernica. In Shapiro’s Israel Apartheid Week cartoon, a cartoon Jewish figure who could have sprung from an issue of Der Sturmer, concedes that Israel is an Apartheid state.

The Muslim terrorists in Gitmo were pictured huddled behind the bars of a giant Statue of Liberty wearing Obama’s face. After Orlando, Trump was depicted in a Nazi uniform holding a sign, “Ban Muslims”. Surely those Muslim terrorists wouldn’t come for him. Or would they?

The years passed. Zapiro defended terrorists and smeared those who fought them. But the terrorists came for him anyway.

They did not care that he hated America and Israel. They did not care that he had stood up for the Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists in Gitmo. They cared only that he had offended Mohammed.

And there could be only one punishment for that crime.

Mail & Guardian editor-in-chief Nic Dawes had dismissed the Muslim threats at the time. “I think all the talk of violence is frankly overblown.”

In 2015, an ISIS network directed two of its terrorists in South Africa to attack American, French and British targets. And to “Kill Zapiro who drew the Messenger of Allah cartoon”.

Other targets on the ISIS hit list included “affluent Jews”, “Jews who fight in Israel”, the King David High School and the South African Zionist Federation. It is hard to know whether Shapiro was more stricken by being targeted by Islamic terrorists or by being classed together with Jews and Zionists.

After so many years of a Goebbelsian drawing frenzy depicting Israelis as monsters, murderers and maniacs, it is doubtful that a single South African Jew had done as much as spit in Shapiro’s face. And yet Shapiro had mildly critiqued Islamic terror against cartoonists once and ended up on an Islamic hit list for life. That is one way of discovering who the monsters, murderers and maniacs really are.

The lesson is as unspoken as it is unambiguous. It’s safe to hate those who defend themselves against Islamic terror. But it’s very dangerous to get on the wrong side of Islamic terrorists.

The ISIS terrorists, Brandon-Lee and Tony-Lee Thulsie, and Ebrahim and Fatima Patel, had plotted to bomb Jewish institutions. And Muslim supporters have shown up with “Free Thulsie Twins” t-shirts. They were the typical face of the new Muslim terrorist, young, tech-savvy and violently ruthless. When Zapiro first drew his Mohammed cartoon, the Thulsies were underage. It is unlikely that they had ever encountered Mohammed’s shrink session while browsing through the pages of the Mail & Guardian.

But Islamic terrorism has a vast network and institutional memory. This terror network stretched from Syria to the United Kingdom to South Africa. Its institutional memory encompassed over a thousand years of Islam. And it nursed countless grudges from ancient wars to a Mohammed cartoon from 2010.

Shapiro, like so many leftists, tried to separate political support for Islamic terror from religious support for Islamic theocracy. It was alright to depict Israelis as monsters for bombing Hamas and Americans as thugs for locking up Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists. But somehow this was never meant to bring about a world in which a cartoonist with solid leftist credentials couldn’t poke a little gentle fun at Islamic theocracy without some of its humorless followers plotting to murder him for it quite a few years later.

But that is exactly the mission of Islamic terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic. Its goal is a world without a sense of humor. As the Ayatollah Khomeini said, “An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam.”

There are, it goes without saying, no cartoons in Islam.

That’s the world of Khomeini’s Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic State of ISIS. It’s the way of life that the Jihad intends to impose on the entire world.

The Islamic regime of ISIS, while enmeshed in multiple wars, still intended to settle an outstanding debt that it owed to the man who had once mocked Mohammed. The Thulsies have failed. But other Islamic terrorists will try. And one day they may even succeed.

Salman Rushdie, another leftist in good standing, discovered that his life as he knew it had ended because he had unintentionally tweaked the joyless Islamic sensibilities of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

“I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth,” Khomeini had ordered.

Other prophets have followers with a sense of humor. Mohammed has followers who are willing to kill around the world in his name. That is how Islam spread around the world. That is how it is still spreading. And the left remains complicit in the spread of theocracy through its alliance with Islam.

When Salman Rushdie was invited to visit South Africa, Muslim pressure on anti-apartheid activists swiftly led to his disinvitation. Muslim anti-apartheid activist Fatima Meer accused Rushdie of attacking the Third World by criticizing Islam. This equivalence between Islam and the Third World, between anti-Imperialism and Islamic terrorism, is at the rotten heart of the alliance between the left and Islam.

It is how South Africa, like so many other countries, finds itself dealing with Islamic terrorism.

The left has made a deal with an Islamic devil without understanding the terms of the deal. Occasionally a bloody clarification is issued with a murderous codicil. And then the left discovers that there will be no cartoons, no jokes and no humor in the Islamic State of Everywhere.

If we want to retain our sense of humor, we are going to have to fight for it.