Europe is burning

The attacks on 7/7 were a reminder that Europe is, more than ever, a center of the threat. That’s partly because European nations like Britain have a tradition of welcoming immigrants from North Africa and Pakistan. The children of those immigrants – many of them jobless and ghettoized in insular suburban tracts or city centers – often feel alienated from the ambient permissiveness of London or Paris.

They are the lumpen jihadists. “Today Europe is facing a Europeanized form of jihad,” says Eric Denece, director of the French Center of Intelligence Research in Paris. “These are young men who were born and grew up in Europe. They look like normal Europeans; and they harness this seething anger and sense of righteous outrage in a manner adapted to what they see as jihad in Europe.”

For the U.S., it’s the second-generation European Muslims – most of them European Union citizens – who are a security risk. “As E.U. citizens, they’re eligible for U.S. visa waivers, which means they can represent a direct threat to the U.S.,” says Robert Leiken of the Nixon Center. “Local groups that are already in place, that grew up in Western Europe and can conduct surveillance for multiple bombings without arousing a great deal of suspicion – this can be an enormous problem.”