Opinion: Last Monday, nine Islamists were arrested in Paris for reportedly plotting to attack the Metro.
On Saturday, Islamist terrorists killed dozens of tourists and injured more in co-ordinated bomb attacks in Bali.
Like Britain and Spain, France and Indonesia were targeted because of their military presence in Iraq.
What's that? France and Indonesia don't have troops in Iraq? Well, okay, not technically. But they're both big supporters of the Bush-Blair neocon warmongering, right? Er, not exactly. In fact, M Chirac, the French president, and M de Villepin, his prime minister, were the chief obstructionists of Bush and Blair for most of 2002 and 2003.
During the same period the Indonesian government denounced Washington as "anti-Muslim" and the country's vice-president publicly dressed down the US ambassador.
And yet the terrorists still want to kill 'em. Fancy that.
Saturday's slaughter in Bali came three years after the carnage of October 2002, just as last week's terrorist arrests in Paris came three years after the suicide attack on the French oil tanker Limburg, off the coast of Yemen and the killing of 11 French submarine technicians in Karachi. After all the valiant sabotage of Bush foreign policy by the Quai d'Orsay, you'd think, if you had to pick only one western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, the shifty French would be a shoo-in.
But they got blown up anyway. As a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden put it: "We would have preferred to hit a US frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels." No problem. They are all infidels. In our time, even the most fascistic ideologies have been savvy enough to cover their darker impulses in sappy labels.
The Soviet bloc was comprised of wall-to-wall "People's Republics", which is the precise opposite of what they were - a stylistic audacity Orwell caught perfectly in 1984, with its "Ministry of Truth" (ie, official lies). But the Islamists don't even bother going through the traditional rhetorical feints.
They say what they mean and they mean what they say, and they have for over 20 years now, since Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hizbullah and the man behind the Beirut bombings, provided the jihad with its all-purpose soundbite: "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."
So, though Bali's Scandinavian backpackers and Aussie barflies and German stoners are unlikely to include among their number many Bush supporters, they were in the end close enough. Yes, the Americans and Jews and Brits are the preferred corpses, but in a pinch, a nightclubbing gay peacenik from Denmark will do.
Let's face it, you can provide a rationale for pretty much any bunch of infidels. Indeed, after the 2002 Bali bombings, the legendary Middle East "expert" Robert Fisk helpfully compiled a list of potential targets just in case one or two of them had failed to catch the jihadists' eye: "Belgium, which hosts Nato HQ; Canada, whose special forces have also been operating in Afghanistan; Ireland, which allows US military aircraft to refuel at Shannon . . ." But even with as enthusiastically comprehensive a list of carnage-scenes-in-waiting as Fisky's, the no-problem-they're- all-infidels line is hard to extend to Indonesia. That's not just any old Muslim nation, but the world's largest Muslim nation.
True, Bali is a relaxed tourist enclave within the country, but that's the point. It's not about US troops in Iraq or the Zionist "occupation" of Palestine or any of the other pretexts. They're symptoms, not the cause.
I found myself behind a car the other day which had a one-word bumper-sticker containing the injunction "CO-EXIST." The "C" was the Islamic crescent, the "O" was the hippy peace sign, the "X" was the Star of David and the "T" was the Christian cross.
Very nice sentiment. But the reality is that it's the first of those symbols that has a problem with "co-existence". The Islamists are at war with pluralism - the idea that different groups can rub along together within the same polity. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, even if one gives no more than a cursory glance to the foreign page, it's easy to guess at least one of the sides: Muslims vs Jews in "Palestine", Muslims vs Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs Christians in Nigeria, Muslims vs Buddhists in southern Thailand, Muslims vs [ Your Team Here].
In fact, your team doesn't even have to be a team. In Bali, it's Muslims vs genial multiculti live-and-let-live.
Whatever one's views of the merits of those various cases, what's consistent throughout is the presence of Islam and the ongoing radicalisation of Islam.
Lee Kuan Yew has spoken of the change in Singapore's Muslims over recent decades: once relatively integrated, they now keep themselves to themselves, are stricter in their observances than they've ever been, and dress their womenfolk in unprecedently severe Middle Eastern fashion. In 2003 a senior Dutch cabinet minister described to me the same phenomenon in his own country: today's young Muslims are more fundamentalist and isolated than their immigrant grandparents were in the early 1970s. Arthur Chrenkoff, an Aussie blogger, and his fellow antipodean author Sophie Masson (who was born in Indonesia) are among many down under who marvel at the way one of the most easygoing Asian Muslim cultures has been radicalised over the last two decades.
If the Islamofascists ever gain formal control of Indonesia, it won't be a parochial, self-absorbed dictatorship like Suharto's, but a launch-pad for an Islamic superstate across southeast Asia and the Pacific.
It's not hard to understand. All you have to do is take them at their word.
As Bassam Tibi, a Muslim professor at Göttingen university in Germany, said in an interesting speech a few months after 9/11: "Both sides should acknowledge candidly that although they might use identical terms, these mean different things to each of them.
"The word 'peace', for example, implies to a Muslim the extension of the Dar al-Islam - or 'House of Islam' - to the entire world. This is completely different from the Enlightenment concept of eternal peace that dominates western thought. Only when the entire world is a Dar al-Islam will it be a Dar a-Salam, or 'House of Peace'."
That's why they blew up Bali in 2002, and last weekend, and why they'll keep blowing it up.
It's not about Bush or Blair or Iraq or Palestine. It's about a world where everything other than Islamism lies in ruins.