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Let us talk of the glorious Piazza del Duomo in Milan.

Across Milan’s public square the citizens of the Italian republic meet, drink, eat, love, argue, shop, and pray. Look up and the eye sees the Gothic Milan cathedral, five centuries in the making, topped by the polychrome Madonnina statue designed by Giuseppe Perego. Look down and, this being Italy, all is la bella vita.

As part of Israel Week, the Piazza was to provide the setting for 15 towers of Israeli culture, technology, agriculture, economics, and art “to present the unfamiliar Israel.”

Not any more.

Menachem Gantz of Ynetnews reports that anti-Israel groups have threatened to “ignite the city” of Milan if the exhibit goes ahead. They have launched a petition to say, “No to Israeli occupation of Milano.” In response the Italian police have refused to handle security. As I write, the municipality seems likely “to move the exhibit to a closed space,” says Gantz.

A “closed space.” Ah, what a very telling phrase that is. Soft terror works by attacking our “public squares” one by one and turning them into “closed spaces.”

We might think these are small concessions—this cancelled play, that closed exhibition, and those “exceptions” made for Muslim schoolgirls (on the insistence of reactionary religious leaders). They are not. They mark the difference between what Robert Conquest called the most basic divide in human history—between “civic” and “despotic” cultures.

Western culture is a civic culture, and to remain such we are going to have to learn how to resist the routine low-level intimidation that is slowly turning our public squares into “closed spaces.”

By the way, the fascist Mussolini also tried to make the Piazza a closed space. Ignoring the architect Mengoni’s plan to create a second triumph arch, Il Duce built the Arengario Palace, and from its balcony he strutted and hectored the mass below. In time, after we gave up on appeasement, we hung Mussolini upside down as the condition of putting our own world the right way up.