The Islamic malignancy...

Why are second and third generation muslim immigrants more radical than the first?

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.