Journalists wrote alarmed pieces about nice boys and girls being transformed into jihadist monsters. Politicians made speeches about the “disease of Islamic extremism”. Academics constructed entire theses on the etymology and evolution of Jihad. Former Islamist radical Maajid Nawaz even seemed relevant. This all now seems a distant memory. How did this happen? Did the jihadists go away, or did we just get bored of them?

Unfortunately, the jihadists haven’t disappeared; Isis, for example, is reportedly resurgent in sub-Saharan Africa, as are its rivals, al-Qaeda. But global jihadism as a movement is in grave disarray . The Isis caliphate is gone, and doesn’t look set to return anytime soon. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Isis leader, is dead: he blew himself up in October 2019 when US Special Operations forces raided his compound in Idlib, Syria. His replacement, Abu Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi, is also dead, biting the Syrian dust earlier this year. But few Western journalists took much notice, and nobody was writing op-eds on a posthumous “martyrdom bump” for Isis, or how they would come back stronger after his demise.

Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, is arguably in better shape, maintaining footholds and some measure of success in ongoing conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Somalia and the Sahel. But its capacity to stage attacks against the West is greatly diminished, thanks to a sustained and successful counter-terrorism operations by the US and its allies, and a shift in the group’s strategic vision, which now prioritises local grievances over global contention. The killing of leader Ayman al-Zawahiri last year in a US drone strike has further weakened its internal solidarity and outward prestige.

According to terrorism scholar Daniel Byman, the last significant jihadist attack in the US was four years ago when a Saudi Air Force trainee working with al-Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate shot and killed three sailors at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, Florida. We have to go back even further to locate the last jihadist attack in the US that resulted in mass-casualties: that was in 2016, when Omar Mateen, inspired by Isis, went on a shooting rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people.

The last deadly Isis-inspired attack in America — Florida again — was in March 2018, when a 17-year old stabbed to death a 13-year old at a sleepover. And while several individuals, including a teenager, have recently plotted in the name of Isis, none have been able to successfully convert inspiration into competent lethal violence. It certainly doesn’t compare to the 2014-2016 period, when Isis-inspired individuals were responsible for more than three-quarters of all deaths (107 in total) caused by jihadist terrorism in America since September 11, 2001.

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A similar downward trajectory can be seen in Europe, although the threat there remains far greater than in the US. According to a recent report by Scenor, there were 105 jihadi attacks in Europe between 2014 and 2022, involving 133 perpetrators and resulting in 405 deaths, far exceeding the death toll of all deadly jihadist attacks in the US since 9/11. The vast majority (90%) were carried out by so-called lone-wolves and most were Isis-related. But the tempo and lethality of attacks has changed. The deadliest (Paris, Nice, Brussels, Manchester) were carried out by Isis attackers, both directed and inspired, between 2015 and 2017, resulting in a collective death toll of 270 victims. But since losing its caliphate, Isis has neither been able to coordinate attacks in Europe nor inspire attackers there in any great number. And when those attacks do happen, they are often amateurish and of limited lethality.

As the threat of jihadist terrorism has receded in the West, so too has media interest in it. And it is hard to exaggerate what a sea-change this represents. “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media,” Zawahiri wrote in a letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the spiritual founder of Isis, in 2005. A decade later, the consensus was that Isis had conclusively won that war. “They’re using the internet better than we use the internet,” as Trump put it in November 2015, simplifying a widely held view that Isis propaganda was far more sophisticated and “slick” than anything the US State Department could come up with.

But the victory was jettisoned as rapidly as it was acquired. By July 2017, the Isis horror show was almost over: in that month, it lost Mosul, its de facto capital in Iraq, and three months later it was to lose Raqqa, its de facto capital in Syria. At the same time, new horror-shows were vying for our attention, much closer to the nascent obsessions that now polarise the political landscape in the West. In April 2018, Alek Minassian drove a truck into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10. It had all the hallmarks of an Isis attack, except that before his attack, instead of proclaiming to be a “soldier of the caliphate”, Minassian had declared the arrival of an “incel rebellion” on Facebook. All of a sudden, incels seemed to be everywhere. Then, in March 2019, just as Isis was losing its last sliver of territory in Syria, Brenton Tarrant, an Australian white supremacist, murdered 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

All of a sudden, white supremacists seemed to be everywhere too. And then something strange happened: journalists and extremism experts who had once made careers out of covering jihadists started to cover the far-Right in almost exactly the same way. Just as Isis had been a transnational, “networked” threat, so too were the white supremacists. And just as Isis had been radicalising children in their bedrooms over the internet, so too has the far-Right. Almost overnight, Brenton Tarrant became the new “Jihad John”, Andrew Tate became the new “charismatic” jihadist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, and 8Chan became the new radical mosque, incubating hate and inciting violence.

The broader context for such a dramatic transposition was the culture war and its insatiable demand for new folk devils with which to wage symbolic battle. For one side in this war, a malevolent progressive ideology, promoted by Left-wing activists, is taking over cherished institutions and perilously endangering our democratic way of life. For the other, a no less toxic ideology of white male supremacy is taking over cherished institutions and perilously endangering our democratic way of life.

Correspondingly, the chief bête noire of anti-progressives are radicals who embrace gender non-conformity and who want to abolish the patriarchy, prisons and much else, while for progressives, the root of all evil lies in the figure of the toxic white male. Jihadists, however, resist assimilation into this classificatory scheme for the obvious reason that they’re Muslims and (mostly) from minority backgrounds. Indeed, in some respects they serve to threaten this scheme, because they’re both anti-LGBTQ and militantly opposed to classical liberalism.

Hence jihadist violence has become a symbolic cul-de-sac for both sides in the culture war, affording neither the opportunity to bring attention to or amplify the concerns — pre-eminently around race and gender — that so preoccupy them. This new hermeneutic regime was sharply in evidence in the lethargy which marked the response of both progressives and conservatives to the murder of the Conservative MP David Amess two years ago by a British Isis supporter. The very day after his killing, the Metropolitan Police declared it an act of terrorism with “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”. But among British elites there was little appetite for exploring that link; instead they chose to focus on the proliferation of online hate speech aimed at MPs.

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Two months prior to Amess’s murder, a 22-year-old British man from Plymouth went on a shooting rampage, killing five, including his mother, before fatally shooting himself. Devon and Cornwall Police did not categorise this rampage as a terrorist incident. But that didn’t prevent many British journalists and commentators from trying to turn it into one. This was because the perpetrator, Jake Davison, supposedly had links to the incel subculture: he was a self-confessed virgin; he believed that women are biologically hardwired to select men based on appearance; he had made references to the “blackpill”; and he had ranted that “women are arrogant and entitled beyond belief”.

Within 24 hours of the attack, The Guardian had described Davison as “a hate-filled misogynist and ‘incel’”, and speculated that “Plymouth shootings may be a sign ‘incel’ culture is spreading.” A day after the murder of Amess, an editorial in The Observer sternly reprimanded anyone who was in mind to “politicise this tragedy” on the basis of “scant details”. No such reprimand was issued by that paper in the days after Davison’s killing spree, despite the considerable uncertainty surrounding his motives. They were too busy politicising it, because they could. By contrast, Ali Harbi Ali, the British-born man who murdered Amess, couldn’t be so readily marshalled for symbolic service in the culture war over race and gender.

It was proof that, in some ways, we have become jaded by jihadists, desensitised to their threat and moral squalor by over-exposure to a media discourse and entertainment industry that, for over a decade and a half, couldn’t get enough of them. If they were once exotic and possessed a certain “jihadi cool“, they now resemble some ageing crooner trading on past glories. We just know too much about them and their shabby pasts as failed rappers, drug-dealers, potheads and porn enthusiasts. Jihadi terror has transmogrified into jihadi triviality.

Yet as Emile Durkheim, the founding father of sociology, once observed, society needs its criminals. We just don’t need jihadists anymore, since new and seemingly more forbidding folk have displaced them. And they have done so not because they are objectively more threatening or murderous (they’re not), but because they reflect the shifting existential anxieties of Western elites in a moment of great and rapid change. These anxieties were once focused on the threat of Islamism to democratic norms. Now, they are entangled in fears and loathing around gender and race. And when these moral panics eventually burn out, no doubt a new breed of devils will emerge, too.

It seems almost certain that more blood will be spilled in the West over blasphemy. Meanwhile, with each new “affair”, the noose around expression is tightened, and people take greater pains to err on the right side of the assassin’s veto. This means that, in effect, well-meaning people and institutions come to accept the logic of the fatwa, but the more we accept it, the lower the bar for extremist allegations drops and, perversely, the more likely violence becomes.

As a new blasphemy controversy bubbles away in Sweden, I wanted to isolate and examine the particular strand of Islamist violence aimed at those perceived to have blasphemed. For the Counter Extremism Project, I identified 71 successful attacks, plots and threat campaigns against individuals or institutions believed to have insulted Islam or the Prophet. (It’s likely there are more.) There are distinct phases to the violence, starting with the years-long global campaign of assassinations and bombings connected to The Satanic Verses. Like a pharaonic curse, catastrophe strikes those connected to the book one by one: bookshops are bombed in London, California and New York; an imam is assassinated in Brussels; a man blows himself up preparing a bomb in a Paddington hotel.

The recurring theme of this first wave of violence is the complete abyss of information. Few suspects are ever charged and, despite the ferocity of the incidents, this suggests there is a professionalism to the attacks, rather than mere anger and opportunism. The CIA was under few illusions about who was behind it, in 1992 reporting that “Iran has shifted from attacking organisations affiliated with the novel — publishing houses and bookstores — to individuals involved in its publication, as called for in the original fatwa”.

In 1991, the novel’s Italian translator was stabbed multiple times but survived, while the Japanese translator was not so lucky: Hitoshi Igarashi was killed in a stabbing frenzy outside his office at Tsukuba university. In 1993, Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher and defender, William Nygaard, was shot and left for dead, requiring months in hospital. The single worst act of violence unfolded that same year, in Turkey, where a secularist activist who translated excerpts of the novel was targeted by a riled-up mob, which set the Madimak hotel ablaze. Their target, Aziz Nesin, escaped the inferno, but 37 innocents did not.

Later, in the early 2000s, Europe’s emerging jihadist movement took up the mantle of the defence of Islam and the Prophet. The first warning signs were the targeting of San Petronio Basilica in Bologna, home to a 15th-century depiction of Muhammad. In Amsterdam, in 2004, one of Europe’s very first dealings with domestic jihadist terror was also the continent’s first exposure to jihadist blasphemy violence: the murder of Theo van Gogh. With Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he had created a film that portrayed verses from the Quran on the naked bodies of women. For this, he was stabbed, shot and nearly decapitated in broad daylight by a 24-year-old named Mohammed Bouyeri, who afterwards plunged a letter saturated with religious fury into his victim’s chest.

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Bouyeri was part of a Dutch network of Salafi jihadists, which, according to his contemporary Jason Walters, was gripped by internal division over whether to focus on proselytising at home, travelling to fight American occupiers in Iraq, or launching attacks in Europe. Bouyeri unilaterally ended the debate with van Gogh’s assassination, after which authorities broke up the network. Walters tells me that even among those who opposed attacks, the murder of van Gogh was deemed legitimate (if strategically disastrous): the filmmaker had insulted Islam.

The following year, Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in an experimental commentary on freedom of speech relating to Islam. Global unrest ensued, claiming some 200 lives. Closer to home, the impact of the cartoons affair cannot be overstated. As the data shows, plots and attacks targeting Jyllands-Posten or individual cartoonists in Denmark lasted almost a decade, until civil war in Syria grabbed the attention of Europe’s Islamists and jihadists. In fact, during the mid-2000s to 2010s, Denmark, with just six million inhabitants, was targeted more often than the United States, the traditional enemy of al-Qaeda. Denmark and Sweden were also disproportionately affected by departures for Islamic State, years later — a fact that dismantles the myth that Scandinavian countries do not suffer homegrown jihadist radicalisation due to their egalitarianism and lack of either colonial history or adventurist foreign policy.

Some of these plots were directed from overseas, such as the 2009 plans by Pakistani-American 40-something David Headley. Headley, who previously helped orchestrate the 2008 Mumbai massacre, wanted to take hostages inside Jyllands-Posten and throw severed heads from the windows to the street below. But plenty of plots were homegrown: domestic jihadists deemed the “covenants of security” with their host nations were null and void, because the cartoons constituted acts of war against Islam.

This interpretation of blasphemy is recurrent: addressing the Danish cartoons, Osama bin Laden declared that the West’s killing of Muslim women and children paled in comparison to Jyllands-Posten’s crimes: “This is the more serious tragedy,” he said in an audio message, “and the reckoning will be more severe.” Likewise, the first issue of al-Qaeda’s English language magazine made clear that killing one of the cartoonists would be an even “greater cause than fighting for Palestine, Afghanistan or Iraq”.

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Similarly exaggerated equivalences have reappeared in later affairs. The man who led the campaign of accusations against Samuel Paty, the teacher who was beheaded after showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a class on free speech, warned that “tolerating” Paty’s actions could lead to a Srebrenica for French Muslims. Indeed, even a UK-registered charity mentioned the genocide of Rohingya Muslims and a Batley schoolteacher showing a Charlie Hebdo cartoon, in the same breath.

Delving into the nature of the plots is revealing. As much as jihadist violence is associated with mass casualty attacks, discriminate violence targeted at blasphemers or other perceived enemies of Islam account for a large share of total terror plots, prior to Isis. When those targets are identified, the violence is excessive and notably vicious, even by jihadist standards. Theo van Gogh was, to use the words of Ian Buruma, “slaughtered like a sacrificial animal”, for instance.

In these attacks, the violence goes well beyond the infliction of death, which can just as well be achieved by a single bullet. It is designed to humiliate, degrade and punish transgressors through extreme violence and dismemberment. For all the apparent “tradecraft”, the same characteristics can be observed among Iranian assassins in the early Satanic Verses campaign. In Britain, the pitiless stomping to death of a former imam in Rochdale accused of black magic, and the knifing of a Glaswegian shopkeeper by a follower of Pakistan’s spiralling anti-blasphemy movements, are results of the same frenzied violence.

It is this increasingly animated blasphemy fervour, emanating from Pakistan, that Britain cannot afford to ignore, given that Iranian operations and jihadist plots continue on British soil. It is the underlying force behind the controversies involving the Batley schoolteacher; last summer’s protests outside Cineworld screenings of The Lady of Heaven, a British-made epic that became the first film to show the “face” of the Prophet Muhammad; and the more recent “Quran-scuffing” incident in a Wakefield school.

In fact, clashes like these, as well as highly discriminate violence, may come to characterise the post-Isis era. Compared with the model of violence unleashed at Manchester Arena and the Bataclan, violence against “blasphemers” inspires a much wider constituency of sympathisers, apologists and relativists — precisely the oxygen terrorism needs to survive. This apologia has, at times, even extended well into the Western media. Terrorists learn, and they will not have overlooked the massive global controversy which followed the killing of Paty. In short, blasphemy violence is not only righteous and obligatory, it better serves the interests of the various extremists competing and jostling as defenders of Islam.

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Admittedly, the story of blasphemy violence is not limited to attacks, which are merely the most visible and visceral part of the equation. Nor is the story of blasphemy violence simply one of intentionally vulgar and offensive cartoons, the loss of which from the public square few commentators will mourn. The Jewel of Medina was a historical novel, which lost its publisher. The Lady of Heaven was a film made by Muslims for Muslims, yet was pulled from British cinemas. The professor who lost her job was teaching a masterpiece of Persian art.

And these are just the cases we know of. Every book never written, every painting never painted, every critique never voiced and every historical inquiry never made: that is the true story of blasphemy violence.

Many of them had travelled to the capital from the coastal towns where al-Shabaab was most active, and where all the structural “push” factors one could imagine are present: poverty, boredom, marginalisation, corruption — and extrajudicial killings. Perhaps that’s what enabled them to diagnose one of the central shortcomings of the policies generally known as Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), of which Britain’s Prevent Strategy is a part. In his independent review of Prevent, published last week, William Shawcross came to the same conclusion: the overemphasis on vulnerability in the process of radicalisation strips individuals of their agency, obscures reality and sucks the politics out of political violence.

This framing is inadvertently written into the policy from its birth in 2011: according to Prevent’s foreword, one of its core objectives is to “prevent people from being drawn into terrorism” (emphasis mine). In this model, the individual is a passive participant in their own descent into terrorism, sometimes manipulated by mysterious online recruiters or pushed by socioeconomic circumstances beyond their control. Over time, the strategy moved into more and more safeguarding settings, and this notion evolved further. As one practitioner told me: “radicalisation is just another form of grooming”.

Such thinking has seeped into broader counterterrorism discourse, but perhaps worst of all it has allowed now-stranded jihadists in Syria to play back Western tropes for domestic consumption. In their versions of events, they were groomed, manipulated or brainwashed into joining Isis, just as they were only ever cooks or engineers in the Caliphate. It’s “only following orders”, updated for the therapy era. The type of people Prevent interacts with has helped to crystallise this notion. No doubt many of those referred to Prevent have various sources of instability in their lives, but this should not be surprising for a policy which relies on local authority services such as mental healthcare as some of its main vectors of delivery. Drawing conclusions about radicalisation based on Prevent referrals and interventions tells us about the type of people referred to Prevent, not necessarily those joining terrorist movements.

Likewise for the increasing concern over the radicalisation risk to children and young people, particularly online. Of course children make up large numbers of referrals for a strategy which is a legal duty for schools. But the involvement of children in political violence is exceptionally rare: the majority of Isis recruits were in their 20s (many much older), and most terror attacks in Western countries to further a racist worldview are being perpetrated by, as Naama Kates puts it, “grown-ass men”.

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Prevent may well be doing a fine job of diverting genuinely vulnerable people away from extremism, but it should be just one part of the strategy’s function. What of the people unlikely to appear on the radar of local services — those who are stable and confident enough in their convictions to justify violence? The man considering killing a human being for eternal reward or the survival of his race is not simply misled or a walking checklist of needs and vulnerabilities; he has never been more assured. It’s not clear Prevent has an answer.

Another concern identified by the review has proven the most controversial — and already the most mischaracterised. Shawcross found that there is a disproportionate focus on the far-Right, and that while Islamist extremism is defined so narrowly as to only take in the likes of Isis, far-Right extremism is defined so loosely as to sometimes include Brexit, populism and garden-variety conservatism. To explain this, it’s necessary to describe the Prevent sector as a whole, which extends well beyond the civil servants, local coordinators or police officers it employs. It includes Prevent-funded civil society organisations, academic centres, NGOs and think tanks (one of which I belong to). Not all of them have a formal connection to Prevent, but all of them help to shape and guide the discourse on extremism and terror. And where the discourse goes, policy praxis follows.

It’s easy for a headline to blame “woke civil servants” for not wanting to talk about Islamist extremism, but the reality is: delivery is bent out of shape by parts of the Prevent sector which have nothing to do with government at all. These are the institutions which churn out paper after paper on the video game-extremism nexus or the trauma of their own work, but which are deafeningly silent when a schoolteacher is decapitated across the Channel and another is forced into hiding closer to home. Some of the organisations which influence thinking are based in North America, which has an entirely different threat picture, but the online discourse flattens this distinction. The effect is clear in Shawcross’s observation that, inside Prevent, resources are distributed concerning organisations with no actual presence in Britain.

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Those delivering Prevent are also subject to external pressures which help pull the strategy “out of kilter” with Britain’s counterterrorism apparatus, as one senior official put it. On one school visit, I was anxiously informed by the concerned headteacher that some of his students’ parents are Daily Mail readers. I have seen third-sector organisations show slides of Mail headlines immediately after Dabiq — Islamic State’s blood-soaked propaganda rag. Others I worked with had slides counted by audiences to ensure equal time was given to the EDL as to ISIS. This was in 2014-15 when hundreds of Brits were travelling to the Caliphate, and in parts of London with no far-Right presence whatsoever. These are the external pressures, but in other cases the call is coming from inside the house, such as the suspicion and accusations identified by Shawcross against those who focus or specialise on Islamism. I’ve seen this for myself, and it’s not clear the strategy can ever function properly while this persists.

Given these pressures, it is not hard to see why some will opt for the easy life or go along with the mantra that the far-Right and jihadists are simply two sides of the same coin. They are of course worthy of a response, but the street hooligans of Britain First or the EDL (let alone the Daily Mail) simply do not exist in the same tactical or moral universe as the present-day génocidaires of Isis — in that they are not orchestrating the mass killing of civilians or exterminating minorities in the Middle East. Since my own experiences some years ago, this trend of equivalence has accelerated and entirely new categories of extremism have come into the Prevent sector’s purview, in what one insider described as the “Andrew Tate-ification of counterterrorism”. Any strategy which concerns itself as much with the EDL as with Isis is probably suffering a lack of conceptual clarity, but any strategy which concerns itself as much with adolescents watching Andrew Tate’s videos as Anwar al-Awlaki’s is probably so broad as to be rendered meaningless.

It means, for instance, that in the past week, violent demonstrations in Knowsley have been used to discredit the Shawcross review and its alleged dismissal of the far-Right threat. Having slugged through all 188 pages, I can confirm no such dismissal is made. In fact, this narrative rather makes the review’s point: that there is a clear difference between unrest — even law-breaking and violent unrest — and the bombing of children at a pop concert or the assassination of an MP. After all, if there is no such distinction, then to remain ideologically fair, Prevent must consider the frequent law-breaking and unrest perpetrated by Left-wing environmentalists. But it largely doesn’t, and nor do I think it should.

While some of the findings of the review will be shocking to many on the outside, the actual demands made of those delivering Prevent are hardly earth-shattering. In fact, amid years of controversy, the review is potentially a lifeline. Shawcross’s only demand is that it returns to its core purpose: preventing the next Thomas Mair or Salman Abedi, not the next online shitposter or Andrew Tate.

Swedish authorities condemned Paludan’s actions, while also reminding the world that the nation is committed to freedom of expression. Islamic authorities, meanwhile, have responded with outrage. Several countries have issued statements condemning Paludan — including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan and Oman — as well as the Scandinavian governments for offering police protection to those who would commit such blasphemy. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Taliban interim government in Afghanistan also issued two statements, one calling on Islamic countries to adopt a joint stance towards such acts, and another asking the Swedish government to take concrete action to punish the culprits.

If it does not, the consequences could be severe. Sweden has been pushing to join Nato since shortly after the outbreak of war in Ukraine. But in order to join the alliance, it needs the approval of every single nation already in it — and that includes Turkey. Even before Paludan’s stunt, President Erdogan’s administration wasn’t particularly inclined to welcome Sweden, which it had repeatedly accused of enabling Kurdish militants. And in retaliation, Turkey promptly suspended talks on Nato expansion. “So you will let terror organisations run wild on your avenues and streets and then expect our support for getting into Nato. That’s not happening,” the outraged President said.

“Erdoğan and his administration have… framed themselves as defenders of Sunni Muslims throughout the world and thus were obligated to react strongly,” explains Tom Lord, co-founder of the Militant Wire research network. Even if Turkey backs down, there is “a chance that Sweden’s accession could be leveraged by Erdoğan’s administration to gain concessions from the US and certain EU countries”.

But exclusion from Nato is not the only consequence Sweden could face. Paludan’s Quran-burning has sparked an extremely hostile online backlash from a range of jihadist groups. The Pakistani Taliban (TTP), Afghan Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), and the central Asian Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) have condemned Sweden, though the tone and optics of the condemnations differ. The TTP’s release — issued by its spokesman Muhammad Khorasani — is more politically calculated and mild in its language, resembling the statement published by the Taliban interim government in Afghanistan. Khorasani states that freedom of speech should not overstep the respect for Islamic symbols, rituals and values, arguing that acts such as Paludan’s constitute a violation of “so-called international law” that global organisations should address — or else dangerous consequences will follow.

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At the other end of the spectrum, though, the Islamic State’s Af-Pak branch directly threatened and encouraged retaliatory attacks. It also impugned Islamic countries for issuing cowardly statements and staging weak protests without taking any practical action against the perpetrators and their countries of origin. Indeed, the response to the Quran-burning has caused tension not only between Sweden and Islamic groups, but between Islamic groups with different agendas. Pro-Al-Qaeda jihadist Hani al-Sibai issued a statement expressing anger not only against Sweden, Denmark and Norway, but also Arabic countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Morocco. He called for the “liberation” of Islamic countries from their regimes, which he described as puppets in the hands of the West.

Meanwhile ISKP took advantage of the incident to challenge its regional enemy, the Taliban. It mocked the interim government, saying that while it claims to have defeated the US in the name of jihad, it issued just a single tweet to condemn the desecration of the Quran in Sweden — while also receiving funds from the Swedish government and protecting foreign organisations. In the latest issue of the magazine Khorasan Ghag, published by ISKP mouthpiece Al-Azaim, the group dedicated several pages to blasphemous acts, threatening to conduct attacks not only in Sweden, but against European citizens wherever they are. Lashkar-e-Jhagvi, which recently resurfaced with its first attack in Pakistan after years of silence, issued a similarly bellicose statement, threatening Europeans with more attacks and lamenting that Muslim organisations with money and power are not taking direct action. Other pro-IS networks did likewise, promising to bring the bloodshed to the streets of Stockholm and wage war on Sweden, saying the “infidels” will continue burning Qurans if Muslims do not take up arms and instil fear into their Western enemies.

All these threats cannot be taken lightly, given the history of blasphemy-motivated terrorism in the West, and Europe in particular, in recent decades. The best-known examples include the beheading of Samuel Paty, the attack on Charlie Hebdo, and last year’s stabbing of Salman Rushdie. But there is an extensive history of plots and attacks targeting the citizens of countries where anti-Islam events take place. In 2005, after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons of Muhammad, a series of demonstrations and attacks were carried out. Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist, was targeted in two assassination attempts in 2008 and 2010. The first plot was foiled by Danish intelligence, which busted a three-man cell made up of two Tunisians and a Dane of Moroccan descent; the second attempt was orchestrated by a would-be attacker with links to Al-Qaeda’s East Africa branch, Al-Shabaab.

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Around the same time, in Sweden, similar assassination plots targeted Lars Vilks, who had drawn the Prophet Muhammad for a newspaper in 2007. Both Westergaard and Vilks survived repeated attempts on their lives. But when both died in 2021 — the former of illness and the latter in a car accident — radicals from across the jihadist spectrum, from Al-Qaeda to Islamic State to Taliban, celebrated. “The impact of the 2005 Jyllands-Posten and 2007 Lars Vilks cartoon controversies on the Western jihadi movement cannot be overstated,” extremism researcher Liam Duffy explains. “Al-Qaeda was able to exploit them as a radicalising tool due to the widespread anger outside of existing extremist circles…the blasphemous incidents were seen as an attack on Islam, even graver than the foreign policy grievances levied at the United States or Britain.”

For that reason, says Duffy, “Sweden and Denmark continued to be disproportionately targeted over other Western states all the way up until the start of the Syrian Civil War, which drew the jihadists’ attention away” — for a while. Now, Rasmus Paludan’s actions have made not only him a target but put Sweden and Denmark at markedly greater risk of terrorism again. Duffy refers to one IS-aligned propaganda group, which issued a direct threat towards Sweden, saying, “if there is no check on the freedom of your expression, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions”, pointing out that this is a reference to legendary jihadist ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki’s influential “The Dust Will Never Settle Down” lecture, which urged violence against blasphemers in the West.

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By Johan Anderberg

But despite all this — despite pro-Islamic State media outlet At-Taqwa calling upon supporters to kill Paludan and carry out violence against Sweden as well as other Western nations — the far-Right leader has not been deterred. Last Friday, he again set fire to a Quran, this time in front of a mosque in Copenhagen, before promising to do this “in front of the Turkish embassy every Friday until Sweden becomes a Nato member”. A couple of days later, retorting to accusations that he is on the Kremlin’s payroll (Putin would like nothing more than to see Sweden’s Nato membership blocked), he set another Quran on fire in front of the Russian embassy in Copenhagen, while making provocative statements directed at Chechnya.

Paludan’s activities may well have put paid to Sweden’s hopes of joining Nato, which would have implications for not only Scandinavian but also European security. They have also heightened the threat of terror across the West, while potentially making Westerners everywhere a target. Such acts have in the past inspired violence against both diplomatic missions and tourists. Meanwhile, they have soured both Sweden and Denmark’s relations with Islamic governments around the world. Turkey, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have even accused the nations of enabling Islamophobia, racism and discrimination. It is striking what one man’s repugnant actions can trigger.