Don't give Charlie Hebdo gunmen what they want

A DECADE or so ago, in his book Terror and Liberalism, the social critic Paul Berman derided the West for repeatedly making the conceptual error of refusing to understand "that, from time to time, mass political movements do get drunk on the idea of slaughter".

Our mistake, he wrote, is "expecting the world to act in sensible ways" - that is, "without mystery, self-contradiction, murk or madness". But terrorism isn…