It’s not just terror bombings:

In the aftermath of 9/11, Americans were treated to a parade of “experts” who assured a worried public that jihadists were perverting the meaning of the term, that the term really and truly only referred to a peaceful, internal struggle — the quest for goodness and holiness. We’ve learned to laugh at this nonsense, but in so doing I fear that we’ve wrongly narrowed the term. To us, jihad is a bomb. It’s a beheading.

No, jihad is an eternal, all-encompassing unholy war against the unbeliever. It is waged in the mind of the believer, to fortify his or her own courage and faith. It is waged online and in the pages of books and magazines, to simultaneously cultivate the hatred and contempt of the committed for the kafir — the unbeliever — while also currying favor, appeasement, and advantage from the gullible West. Jihad is the teaching in the mosque. It is the prayer in the morning, the social-media post in the afternoon, and the donation to an Islamic “charity” in the evening.

There is jihad in predatory, coordinated sexual assault, there is jihad when Western camera crews are chased from Muslim neighborhoods, and there is jihad when Muslim apologists invariably crawl from the sewers of Western intelligentsia, blaming Europeans for the imperfections in their life-saving hospitality. So don’t make the mistake of believing that Europe or America only “periodically” or “rarely” deal with jihad. We confront it every day, just as the world has confronted it — to greater or lesser degrees — ever since Muslim armies first emerged from the Arabian peninsula. While not all Muslims are jihadists, jihad is so deeply imprinted in the DNA of Islam that the world will confront it as long as Islam lives.

While millions, most Muslims are peaceful, Islam itself is an infection that has haunted the world for over a millennium. There have been long periods of dormancy, but it occasionally flares up when given an opportunity. I don’t know how this will end, but I’ve been saying for years that the end will not be pretty.

Related: A Muslim explains how he discovered that the Quran encourages violence.

Andy McCarthy analyzes the timing of the latest attacks, and Theodore Dalrymple wonders what to do with the terrorist camps in the heart of Europe.