French police investigating plans by a group of Islamic extremists to attack targets in Paris discovered last month that the group was recruiting French citizens to train in the Middle East and return home to carry out terrorist attacks, sources familiar with the investigation said.

One French official said the extremists were using a virtual "underground railroad" through Syria to spirit European and Middle Eastern citizens into and out of Iraq. A senior French law enforcement official, who declined to be quoted by name because he was speaking about classified information, said French citizens had undergone terrorist training at camps in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

"There's always been an enormous jihad zone to train people to fight in their country of origin," the official said. "We saw it Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and now we're seeing it in Iraq."

What's new, he said, is that the French cell under investigation "is linked with networks in Iraq, right now, through an individual based in Syria. Now we're finding camps in Syria and Lebanon, and it's the same pattern, training in explosives and chemical weapons, which is an obsession of the jihadists."

In a recent television interview, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy called the terror risk for Paris "very high," adding, "We know that there are about 10 young Frenchmen in Iraq, ready to become kamikazes."

Following bombings in London this year and Madrid last year that together killed more than 240 people, leaders across Europe concluded that no capital was immune to attack. French officials in particular worried that their long history of fighting Algerian extremist groups, their government's ban on Muslim girls wearing head scarves in public schools and feelings of alienation among France's 6 million Muslims made Paris an obvious target. The country's opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq would not protect it, they concluded.

From the same article we learn that Islamic terrorism is a much bigger problem in Europe than in the U.S., because Europe has a relatively larger Muslim community. According to Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform in London, "What the war in Iraq has done is radicalize these people and make some of them prepared to support terrorism. Iraq is a great recruiting sergeant." But Grant's assumption ignores the fact of Eruope's own contribution to Islamic terrorism, described by Francis Fukuyama, academic dean of Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies:

Western Europe is a core recruiting ground for Muslim terrorists that is being overlooked given the U.S. focus on Iraq and the Middle East, according to Francis Fukuyama, academic dean of Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

The failure of European countries to assimilate their large and growing Muslim populations in the era of globalization has caused an alienation among the young that has created a "hard core for terrorism," Fukuyama said in Washington at a bipartisan policy forum on terrorism and security, sponsored by the New America Foundation.

"Fixing the Middle East is only part of the problem. It is a West European problem, too," Fukuyama said. He pointed out that the leaders of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks came out of a cell in Hamburg and that most of the extremists participating in the more recent bombings in Spain and England were born in those countries.

Fukuyama's analysis squares with recent CIA conclusions about the importance of Western Europe, where, as one former senior intelligence official put it yesterday, "there are 10 million Muslims . . . that are not integrated into their societies."

All about Iraq? Guess again. The Paris riots are about 2 thieves that hid from police, even though the police weren't chasing them? Guess again. The riots have erupted from the African Muslim's self-imposed ghetto and refusal to assimilate - these are significant contributing factors, as are the French government's policies. But what we are really seeing in France, and throughout Europe, is what Mark Levin refers to as "The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility that has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict," and warns "Wake up, Europe, you've a war on your hands."

And the events and warnings precluding the riots in France today, are not happenstance or solely the result of the Iraq war, and are indeed planned events that relate to issues far beyond the war in Iraq.

Lest the French forget - they didn't participate and vociferously attacked America over the Iraq issue (of course the "oil for food scandal has shown us why). Like is pointed out at Captains Quarters, "Within six weeks of the GSPC announcement, we see a massive and coordinated uprising originating from the ghettoes in which Algerian and other Muslim refugees and their families live. The "riots' have sophisticated coordination between cell leaders, using the Internet and instant messaging as well as cell phones -- an odd tool for a spontaneous demonstration where one neighborhood would hardly have those phone numbers at the ready."

Also, as Captain Ed writes: "The Islamist connection might get ignored by the media now, but when it involved Iraq as a training base (as the Post article did), they had no hesitation in writing about it. One wonders why they have suddenly developed amnesia about it now."