EUROPE has suffered many Islamist terrorist attacks in recent years, but before the assault on Charlie Hebdo, only two of them caused more than ten deaths: the Madrid train attack in May 2004 and the London tube and bus bombings 14 months later. Various factors threaten to mar this broadly reassuring picture. The civil wars in Libya, Yemen and Syria mean there is a much broader range of places and groups from which threats can come. There has never previously been anything remotely on the same scale as Islamic State in terms of financial resources, territory and sophistication. Yet the threat to life and limb from Islamic terrorism remains far greater for non-Westerners. Within the past month alone, Islamist attacks in Nigeria and in Pakistan, among others, have claimed many more lives than the atrocities in France.