Western Intelligence

I've been saying for years that our fixation on "Al Qaeda" restricts our peripheral vision to a much broader problem of Islamic extremism around the world -- and within our West (the latter largely because the West unprecedentedly in history only a half century ago invited in millions of Muslims and now feels they can't stop the inward flow, much less eject the millions already here).

The French Muslim assassin who recently in the name of Islam mass-murdered seven people (including chidlren in cold blood) called himself "Al Qaeda" because he admired them -- but that doesn't mean

a) he was a card-carrying member of their organization

nor

b) that "Al Qaeda" is all we have to worry about -- rather than Islam, straight no chaser.

Now, slowly, it seems that, at least in part, like a slug moving across a lawn of dew-gummy moss at the speed of a clock's hour hand or of a watched pot boiling, European intelligence is wising up to this fact:

...authorities say there's a dangerous twist: the emergence of homegrown extremists operating independent of any known networks, making them hard to track and stop.

"We have a different kind of jihadist threat emerging and it's getting stronger," Europol chief Rob Wainwright told The Associated Press in an exclusive telephone interview from The Hague. "It is much more decentralized and harder to track."