Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, accused the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo of committing the sin of provocation when fifteen of the journal’s staff were slaughtered by two young Algerian Muslims on January 7, 2015. Hateful cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, or so the narrative went, triggered the murders. Tyler Robinson, a decade later, was provoked but by a different Charlie. This assassin, too, felt he had no alternative but to perform what we might call – stretching the customary definition – an “honour killing”. Erdoğan and the “yes…but” apologists for the assassination of Charlie Kirk share a rejection of Western-derived modernity. That is to say, the sovereignty of the individual. The ideologies of Wokeism and Islamism are different manifestations of the same cultish tribalism: the negative cohesion connecting the two is a rejection of freedom-of-expression absolutism under the pretext of the sin of provocation.
