The Jerusalem Post reports that US Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff said Tuesday that “[t]errorist groups are believed to be actively recruiting Western Europeans for possible attacks in Europe, or to use the continent as a springboard for strikes in the United States.”

“Europe is a place where we have seen attacks carried out. It’s a place where we know they are recruiting operatives who can pass freely in Western Europe,” Chertoff told reporters. “Whether the attack is aimed at Western Europe or aimed at coming to the US from Western Europe, that’s one of the things we have to be focused on,” he added.

Chertoff explained that terrorist organizations are trying to recruit people who do not fit the “stereotype of what a terrorist looks like … (people) who are Western in appearance, Western in experience, can mingle freely in the West without attracting attention, who will be easier to slip into the stream of travel.”

“The hardest person to detect is someone who comes in with a clean record, a legitimate passport, an easy understanding of how to operate in the West because they’ve grown up there, and an intent to carry out a murderous act,” he said.

So how to deal with these European terrorists? Well, Chertoff said that the US is busy collecting more information on individuals “including biometric details on individuals,” “to make it harder for people to slip under the radar.”

The terrorists of the future, operating in Europe and the United States are probably Muslims whose parents or grandparents migrated to the West - so they were born and raised here - or Western converts. We know that there are some fundamentalists busily trying to convert people in both the Netherlands, but especially also Germany and the United Kingdom. These Islamists do not just try to convert Westerners to Islam, they try to convert them to a radical version of Islam.

And since most Westerners do not know much about Islam, do not know much about its history, and about different schools within Islam, many are easily deceived.

This is a real problem, and I sadly do not think that Chertoff’s approach will suffice.

h/t to Holly