NEW YORK — Now that U.S. intelligence officials believe North Korea was behind the cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, the discussion has moved away finally from emails about Angelina Jolie to the real story, which is far more troubling. One of the nastiest regimes in the world has effectively threatened to launch terror attacks in America if an artistic work were to be shown publicly. And, stunningly, almost everyone involved has caved.

Imagine that the Iranian government had threatened a terror attack on U.S. soil if, say, a book were about to be released that parodied its Supreme Leader. Would we not regard this as an intolerable surrender to threats of terror and a violation of core principles such as freedom of speech? In fact, a somewhat similar situation did arise in the fatwa pronounced by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on Salman Rushdie because of the author’s 1988 book “The Satanic Verses.” And much of the free world — though certainly not all — rallied to Rushdie’s side to defend his right to write a satirical, even inflammatory, book about Islam and its prophet.

Yet when confronting an almost identical circumstance today with the Sony movie “The Interview,” the reaction has been much different. After the country’s largest theater chains said they would delay the film’s opening, Sony announced it would officially cancel the Dec. 25 release. Other movie studios did not rally behind Sony. (In fact, Deadline magazine reported Wednesday that another movie set in North Korea, a thriller starring Steve Carell, has been canceled.)

It could be said that this movie is just a comedy. But Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” was also a comedy satirizing an evil maniac, Adolf Hitler. And it is worth remembering that when Chaplin’s movie was being made in the late 1930s, Neville Chamberlain’s government wanted to ban its distribution in Britain, in service of its policy of appeasement toward Nazi Germany. By the time the movie was released in 1940, Britain was at war with Germany and everything had changed.

Why does a terrorist threat from North Korea produce appeasement whereas threats from Islamic terrorists produce courage, defiance and resilience? I suspect it’s because we are fully aware of the barbarism of jihadi terrorists. But we tend to think of North Korea in somewhat comical terms — the odd dictators with their strange haircuts, the weird synchronized mass-adulation in stadiums, the retro-propaganda and rhetoric.

In fact, North Korea is one of the world’s most repressive and brutal dictatorships. Estimates are that it abducted thousands of people from neighboring countries following the Korean War, allowed 1 million to 2 million of its own people to starve in a famine in the 1990s, and currently imprisons about 100,000 people in labors camps.

The United Nations appointed a panel to investigate the human rights situation in North Korea; its report, released in February, paints a picture of a regime that really has no parallel in the scale of its systematic cruelty and oppression.

The challenge that movie studios and theaters face is real because they have to balance the issue of freedom of expression with safety and commerce. But they have made a mistake. I understand it well. In 2009, Yale University Press published a book on the Danish cartoon controversy, but refrained from publishing the actual — offending — cartoons (of Prophet Muhammad) because of fears of retaliation and violence. As a trustee of the university, I was asked to defend the decision (one I would not have made). Swayed by my concerns for an institution I love deeply and a group of administrators I respect greatly, I made a statement supporting the university’s actions that I have always regretted. The right response then and now must be to affirm freedom of expression.

The U.S. government has to find a way to respond to this act of aggression on American territory. If not, North Korea will have gotten away with its worst cyberattack to date, as well as the most brazen threat of terrorism in recent times. It will be triumphant and emboldened. And surely, groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State will take note that the way to scare countries into submission is to threaten these very kinds of attacks. At that point, the story about the emails and Angelina Jolie and movie executives’ salaries will be about much more than a Hollywood comedy.

Fareed Zakaria is a columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group.