WASHINGTON -- Last Nov. 2, Theo van Gogh, Dutch filmmaker and descendant of the painter, was cycling through Amsterdam. He was accosted by Mohammed Bouyeri, who shot him six times as Van Gogh pleaded ``We can still talk about it! Don't do it!'' Bouyeri then cut his throat with a kitchen knife, severing his head all the way to his spine. Bouyeri was not done. He then took a five-page Islamist manifesto and with his knife impaled it on van Gogh's chest.
  
  On trial now in Holland, Bouyeri is unrepentant. In court he turned to van Gogh's grieving mother, and with infinite cruelty said to her, ``I do not feel your pain.''

     He feels instead glory. Van Gogh had made a short film about the oppression of Muslim women. Bouyeri was acting ``purely in the name of my religion,'' championing his faith by butchering a filmmaker critical of it.

     Bouyeri is no newly arrived immigrant. Nor is he, like the 9/11 hijackers, a cosmopolitan terrorist sent abroad to kill. He is native born and bred in Holland. As were three of the four London bombers, who were second-generation Pakistani Brits.

     The most remarkable discovery is that Europe's second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants are more radicalized than the first. One reasonably non-political and non-radical Muslim activist, raised in the suburbs of Paris, explained himself (to The Wall Street Journal) as having ``immigrated to France at the local maternity ward.''

     The fact that native-born Muslim Europeans are committing terror acts within their own countries shows that this Islamist malignancy long predates Iraq, long predates Afghanistan and long predates 9/11. What Europe had incubated is an enemy within, a threat that for decades Europe simply refused to face.

     Early news reports of the London bombings mentioned that police found no suspects among known Islamist cells in Britain. Come again? Why in God's name is a country letting known Islamist cells thrive, instead of just rolling them up?

     British Islamists had spoken of a ``covenant of security'' under which Britain would be spared Islamic terror so long as it allowed radical clerics free rein. Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, for example, a Syrian-born, exiled Saudi cleric granted asylum 19 years ago, openly preaches jihad against Britain. He is sought by the press for comment all the time. And, a lovely touch, he actually lives on the British dole -- even though he rejects the idea of British citizenship, saying, ``I don't want to become a citizen of hell.''

     One of the reasons Westerners were so unprepared for this wave of Islamist terrorism, not just militarily but psychologically, is sheer disbelief. It shockingly contradicts Western notions of progress. The savagery of Bouyeri's act, mirroring the ritual human slaughter by Zarqawi or Daniel Pearl's beheaders, is a return to a primitiveness that we in the West had assumed a progressive history had left behind. Continued...