A few years ago, before the Arab Spring broke out in the Middle East and became a gloomy, rainy winter, I had a talk with a former senior official in Israel’s Shin Bet on condition of anonymity. This man’s entire life was dedicated to the war against terror; acquiring him a long, personal and even intimate familiarity with radical Islam. At the time, he told me, “Israel will, sometime in the next decade, become one of the safest places in the Middle East. Afterward, it will become one of the safest places in Europe.”

I asked him for an explanation. “We have been coping with radical Islam for generations already,” he said. “We are prepared, we are realistic, we understand and know what we are up against. They are not.”

I asked who "they" are. “’They,’ first and foremost, refers to the traditional Arab regimes, but not just them. The Muslim minority in Europe will raise their heads sometime,” he said. “When that happens, I don’t want to be there. All hell will break loose on the Europeans who continue to babble about their human rights and don’t understand that radical Islam lives in another reality, with a different set of rules, on another planet.”

Amos Biderman, one of the most successful contemporary Israeli caricaturists, penned a front-page column today, Jan. 8, for Haaretz under the headline, “Paris attack shows that the bad guys have won.”