Seldom does a terrorist attack on Western citizens pass without immediate government statements or media reports condemning the barbarous assault on civilized societies and cherished liberaldemocratic principles. A few examples may suffice to support the point. In his inauguration speech on 20 January 2017, President Donald J. Trump announced his intention ‘to unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the earth’. Commenting on 15 November 2015 on both attacks in Paris that had taken place two days earlier and attacks in Ankara on 10 October, President Barack Obama maintained that ‘the killing of innocent people, based on a twisted ideology, is an attack not just on France, not just on Turkey, but … an attack on the civilized world’. Referring in a statement on 13 September 2014 to ‘IS’ policies of abduction, enslavement, rape and forced marriage, the US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues, Cathy Russell, proclaimed that ‘viciousness against innocents exposes ISIL's blatant rejection of the most basic progress we have made as a community of nations and the universal values that bind civilization’. Similar reactions to ‘IS’ followed the destruction of major cultural sites such as ancient temples in Palmyra. On 1 September 2015, the Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, declared that the destructive acts were an ‘intolerable crime against civilization’. That discourse is not confined to the US and Western societies more generally. The same terminology was employed by the Chinese President, Xi Jinping at the meeting of the 23rd Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in Manila on 19 November 2015 when he described terrorism as ‘the common enemy of human beings’ and added that decisive action would be taken against those who committed a ‘terrorist crime that challenges the bottom line of civilization’. Finally, in an address to the United Nations General Assembly on 2 October 2015, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, portrayed Israel as ‘civilization's frontline in the battle against barbarism’ and the ‘fanaticism’ of ‘IS’. Drawing on familiar contrasts between the medieval world and the modern world, he warned of the danger that terrorist organizations with access to weapons of mass destruction would recreate the ‘barbarism of the ninth century’.