Elsewhere around the world, in the Philippines and Indonesia, Morocco, Turkey, and Russia, those entrusted with the globalization that will connect us all are facing up to the single greatest challenge to freedom since the rise and subsequent fall of Communism in the former Soviet Union, and its quiet, but steady dissolution in the Republic of China. Communism thrives on poverty, so we will continue to see pockets of it where nations resist the capitalist, free trade, and entrepreneurial ingredients of prosperity.

Few regions of the world are more plagued with poverty than the Middle East and Africa, both places where Islam is widely practiced. So, despite the billion or more Muslims in the world, the new enemy of the world is Islam as personified in its most extreme form. Nothing, however, about Islam is benign.

Anyone who has read the Koran, Islam?s ''holy'' book, knows that it is replete with constant calls to war, constant reinforcement of the belief that those who do not submit to Islam are unworthy of life. "Disbelievers will be burned with fire." "Kill disbelievers wherever you find them." "War is ordained by Allah." This theme is relentlessly driven home in chapter after chapter.

A friend of mine who is fighting to free his fellow Iranians from the grip of the ayatollahs says, "You can?t reason with people blinded by hate. Islam hates the power of the individual. Islam hates the achievements of women. Islam hates the religious freedom of others. Islam is against the free will and hates liberty and justice for all."

Now that Europe has awakened to the threat, there is evidence that its various security and law enforcement agencies are beginning to take action. Consider a small news item in late November that did not make it into the mainstream media. Morocco and Spain smashed a large al Qaeda network that was gearing up for new attacks in Western Europe. Some twenty suspects were arrested in Morocco, ten in Spain, and several more were secretly picked up in the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. Several members of the network had been meeting in Turkey to coordinate attacks on American, Israeli and Jewish targets.

Meanwhile, in Iraq where the spineless "anti-war" objectors continue to say we are losing, its citizens braved death to vote for a constitution and a democracy such as does not exist any other comparable Arab nation.

In addition, the US military?s latest offensive in the western region succeeded in killing more than 700 terrorists and capturing 1,500 in the last two months or so. The offensive in Iraq has done what it intended to do, remove the dictator Saddam Hussein and then become a killing ground of every wannabe martyr for Islam. You can either kill them there or you can pull out our troops and end up having to fight them in the streets of America.

In an excellent, new book, "Al Qaeda in Europe", by Lorenzo Vidino spells out just how great a struggle lies ahead for a continent that, despite a magnificent cultural history of great art, architecture, music and literature gave us two major wars in the last century. It was, in fact, the positioning of vast US military forces throughout Europe and the creation of NATO that insured the freedom that was formerly threatened first by Nazism and then Communism, and now faces the new threat of militant Islam.

Europe remains a great tourist attraction with its great churches, largely unattended by a local population that has turned away from Christianity, an industrial base threatened by an archaic Socialist system, and an indigenous population whose every need is tended to cradle-to-grave and which has failed to demographically reproduce itself sufficiently. Europe is running out of Europeans.

Indeed, the social system Europe created proved to be a magnet for millions from Northern Africa and the Middle East after colonialism retreated. Thanks to Socialism, however, jobs did not increase, nor did anything resembling assimilation. Muslims saw themselves as living amidst unbelievers and, with the certitude the Koran confers, found no cause to abandon the religion that had failed to produce any freedom in the nations they left behind and which is responsible for their failed economies.

As Vidino notes, for "over forty years, European countries have knowingly and voluntarily hosted hundreds of Islamic fundamentalists. Acting on humanitarian motives, for decades countries such as Britain, Sweden, Holland, and Germany have made it their official policy to welcome political refugees from all over the world." [creating a bloody situation within European societies - for offering equality to a culture that clearly violates all humanitarian laws]  that Unfortunately, "most European countries rarely distinguished between democracy-supporting opponents of autocratic regimes and Islamic fundamentalists who had bloodied their hands in their home countries with heinous terrorist acts."

Indeed, the duty of all Muslims is to bring Islam to the Europe their predecessors had failed to conquer in earlier centuries. The "crusaders" had to be subjugated, converted to Islam, and, given enough time, Muslim immigrants believed they could achieve this.

Europe, however, must now institute a whole new system of integrated law enforcement to meet the threat of terror. [Or - simply use a better Power that can kill 'terrorism'] That is why the news of a coordinated effort to smash a large al Qaeda network is such good news. For too long, Europeans have lacked the machinery of law and internal security to meet the now too-obvious threat in their midst.

There is some irony in all this because terrorism in France and elsewhere is not a new phenomenon. In the summer of 1995, France experienced an unprecedented string of attacks and, in July of that year, a bomb exploded in a Paris metro station, killing seven people. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has recently announced new, tightened controls on immigration.

Before we chide Europe, it is well to remember that in 1993 the first, albeit unsuccessful, attack on the Twin Towers occurred on our soil. Americans at that time were encouraged to regard it as a criminal act, not part of a determined effort to destroy our society. Attacks on American Marines in Beirut, on American embassies in Africa, and on the USS Cole had failed to generate a level of awareness or concern about the Islamic Jihad.

We know better now. Or do we? While Europe begins to identify and rid itself of the cancerous Islamofacism in its midst, Americans are still debating over getting control of our own national borders, despite a population of illegal immigrants estimated to be upwards of ten to twelve million. This suggests that we are still far short of putting this nation on a war footing, implementing the measures needed to protect the homeland.

The war is global and while, of the more than a billion adherents of Islam, surely the vast majority are good people who may well deplore what is done in the name of Islam, the fact remains that millions of Muslims hold fast to and support the deadly fantasies of Islam.