Assassination has been described as the ultimate form of censorship. The simple, brutal truth of that observation was brought home as never before in modern times in the streets of Paris yesterday.

Terrorists armed with rocket launchers and machine guns slaughtered the staff of a popular French satirical magazine, engaging in a type of murderous summary justice for what they claimed was the publication’s capital crime of defaming their religion.

Of course, the perpetrators of this atrocity were to their faith what members of the Nazi Party were to German nationalism. They have hijacked, perverted and criminalised the relatively innocuous and generally inclusive tenets of a great religion to better pursue a political-militaristic agenda.

And their monstrous ideology owes more to the barbaric values of power, plunder and the merciless punishment of real and perceived heretics than anything even remotely resembling Islam’s fundamental principles of compassion, kindness, honesty, charity and hard work.

As French Islamic leaders who visited the scene of the Paris massacre said: “They have hit us all. We are all victims. These people are a minority.”

A tiny minority indeed. In fact the terrorists’ creed amounts to something very like Islam with a fascist face.

Like the Nazis before them, they have created a murderous, death-fixated cult which views modern civilisation and all civilised standards with implacable hatred.

They advocate the fierce subordination of women and the complete repression of sexuality.

They have a homicidal intolerance for free speech, cultural pluralism and other bellwether precepts of 21st century liberal democracy.

They view art, literature and most other forms of creative expression as symptoms of decadence and degeneracy.

They are animated by an unquenchable thirst for revenge for ancient humiliations and reversals which often owe more to folklore than the historical record, yearning to recreate a supposed golden age which exists largely in their imaginations. Just as Hitler pursued a demented revanchist dream to reconstitute a mythical Greater Germanic Reich, today’s jihadists invoke the glory days of a medieval caliphate which was never so much a united, monolithic empire as it was a loosely aligned patchwork of co-religionists with a common linguistic and cultural inheritance.

And, of course, there is the pathologically malevolent hatred of Jews and Judaism shared by both the jihadists and the Nazis.

Even now there are apologists in the West engaging in torturous mental contortions based around a particularly facile understanding of cultural relativism to rationalise — even justify — yesterday’s bloodbath. As is so often the case, they entirely miss the point.

Jihadists kill because death is their way of life. It does not actually matter to them if their victims are French satirists, Kurdish families, Dutch filmmakers, Israeli tourists, Pakistani schoolchildren, Mesopotamian Marsh Arabs, Egyptian Coptic Christians or Western journalists: anyone who does not share their dogmatic beliefs is fair game.

And claims of incitement on the part of the French magazine, Charlie Hebdo, ring entirely hollow. Provocation is, after all, a pretext employed by all zealots to explain away their actions while attempting to ensure the world capitulates to them and their demented actions.

The publication is nothing if not an equal opportunity critic, one which delights in tweaking any number of sacred cultural, political and religious cows. In any event, banning anything which anyone claims is blasphemous or seditious is the ultimate slippery slope for societies based on the rule of law rather than theocratic or totalitarian principles. For implicit in the right of freedom of speech is the right to scrutinise, criticise and satirise. And, frankly, any belief system whose more extreme adherents feel is unable to withstand the occasional dose of bad taste is probably not worth believing in.

Charlie Hebdo first drew the wrath of the fanatics in 2012 for publishing caricatures deemed offensive by Islamic extremists and had been under round-the-clock police guard ever since. At the time of that controversy, editor Stéphane Charbonnier, better known by his cartooning nom de plume Charb, said his magazine would only “shock those who will want to be shocked ... I don’t feel as though I’m killing someone with a pen. I’m not putting lives at risk. When activists need a pretext to justify their violence, they always find it.”

Charbonnier’s point was proved most bitterly yesterday morning when he died with his colleagues as jihadists broke through the protective police cordon and stormed the magazine’s 11th arrondissement offices.

The carnage in Paris was an attack not just on one relatively small-circulation European publication. It was an attack on universal freedoms and rights, on a way of life the West — including tiny Bermuda — has come to take for granted but which remains extremely vulnerable to the brute-force actions of militants.

In the aftermath of yesterday’s tragedy it is worth remembering Charlie Hebdo’s vociferous opposition to religious fundamentalism and religiously sanctioned strictures on freedom of expression actually predated the 2012 controversy. In 2006, during a global uproar surrounding the publication of images of the Prophet Mohammed drawn by a Danish cartoonist, the magazine published a front-page cartoon of Islam’s central figure.

It was headlined “Mohammed Overwhelmed By Fundamentalists” and showed the crying prophet exclaiming: “It’s hard being loved by lunatics.” After yesterday’s outrage, that is a message even censorship by assassination will now prove incapable of silencing.