Daily terror diet

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BERLIN -- The report of the 23-year-old French housewife who was riding a suburban commuter train with her 3-year-old child in a stroller when six North African youths (aged 15 to 20) advanced on her knives drawn, is now being questioned, as police discovered the woman's troubled past.

The story she tells is that the youths shredded her T-shirt and pants, held her head down on the floor as she screamed "Help." A score of other passengers looked on in silence, too frightened to intervene.

Rifling through her pocketbook, one attacker found her ID and shouted, "She's Jewish," which she wasn't. With a marker pen, they daubed her stomach with three Nazi swastikas, then fled for the exit at the next station, knocking over the stroller and spilling out the child. The conductor said his train on the "RER D" line was a mobile housing slum where the cops fear to tread.

True or not, the woman's story was all too believable.

Most major French cities are marred by North African slums that seethe with hatred under the sway of self-appointed fundamentalist firebrands. Their anti-Semitic Friday sermons also show contempt for "a France that won't give us jobs."

The French internal counterintelligence service RG (Renseignements Generaux) recently reported to Dominique de Villepin, France's new interior minister, that almost 2 million of France's 6 million North African Muslims now live in some 300 "troubled neighborhoods."

Rebel Muslims in Europe are not uniquely French. This week, German police raided a Moroccan mosque in Frankfurt, where children as young as 9 were shown videos that called for "holy war against unbelievers."

Intelligence chiefs from Brussels to Berlin and from London to Lisbon talk about the elephant in the room that politicians would like to ignore: Islamist extremists in democratic countries who become citizens of European countries, hold EU passports, and are protected by laws that guarantee freedom of speech and assembly.

Europe's multiple intelligence services -- NATO's 26 members hold almost 100 between them, including 15 in the United States -- inform each other of what they know about the activities of individual terrorists, but the evidence cannot be introduced in court without disclosing sources and methods. In recent months, judges in Germany, France and Belgium have exonerated known members of Muslim terrorist networks for lack of evidence.

After the fiascoes of the misleading intelligence that provided justification for "a war of necessity" that was not necessary, there is also growing distrust of intelligence services in general. Judges have made sarcastic remarks about the CIA and Britain's MI6 in particular.