Years and Years Behind in Vengeance

"Since the Nice attack, Jihadists have openly been offering praise, claiming the event was part payback against the West as well as a warning of more horrific things to come."
"According to MEMRI, many terror sympathizers shared gruesome images of the attack online, with captions such as 'Nice attack: We warned you'; 'It’s beautiful'; 'We want Paris before Rome.' Pro-ISIS channel Kawasir Al-Nasher posted a message in English that read: 'Oh crusaders, we told you…The next attack is coming soon, we are everywhere, Allah Akbar'."
"ISIS media operatives of the French-Arabic group Nashir for Design distributed several online posters and images with the caption, 'Inshallah we will conquer your lands, you will become Muslims despite yourselves or you will pay the capitation tax in humiliation, otherwise the sword will slice your necks. It is Allah’s promise'."
"Posting photos of dead children in Syria, the group warned, 'This is what your planes do to our children, so accept what is happening to you…It is only the start, we are years and years behind!"
Lea Speyer, the algemeiner 

"It was clear that the driver was doing it [driving into the Bastille Day crowd of 30,000 people] deliberately."
"People were shouting, 'It's a terrorist attack, it's a terrorist attack. I was walking for nearly a mile and [saw] that there were dead bodies [all] over the place."
"I saw two sisters and one brother from Poland that were mourning the death of their two other siblings."
"There were so many Muslim people who were victims because I could see they had scarves over their head and some were speaking Arabic; one family lost a mother and in Arabic they were saying she's a martyr."
Maryam Violet, Iranian journalist, Nice tourist

As far as attacks on innocent people are concerned, this one, conducted by a 31-year-old French-Tunisian, born in France, father of three, driver by trade, petty criminal not known to be overly religious, was a resounding success by terrorist-jihadi standards. There are 84 people dead, 202 injured, 52 of whom are in critical condition and among whom there are 25 who may not survive, certain to increase the death toll. 

The attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, had been driving a large white moving-type truck, when he suddenly swerved into a crowd dispersing after fireworks had ended the celebrations, and then proceeded to zig-zag right, then left, then right again, for over a mile, exacting maximum carnage, killing people as he proceeded. Until police, arriving on the scene, shot at the man and his truck in an exchange of gunfire with the assassin, until he was killed.

AFP -- A reproduction of the residence permit of Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, from French police sources

France was on high alert for this holiday celebration, knowing full well what a magnet large crowds of people signify for those whose purpose it is to extract their brand of vengeance on the West. Until Germany took in a million refugees last year to augment their already-established Muslim population of close to five million, France had the distinction of having the largest Muslim population in Europe. With all the headaches attendant on absorbing such a large group of people whose culture and religion ensure non-assimilation into the host culture.

Despite that high alert, despite the dispatch of police, despite the presence of military on the lookout for any potential disruptions to the peace, a man who has French citizenship, familiar with Nice because he lives there, was able to wrench the world to attention in yet another jihadist attack in Europe, in a country that has already suffered numerous earlier barbarous slaughters organized by Islamist terrorist groups.

How does that fit in with French President Francois Hollande stating his assurance in his Bastille Day address that the country's state of emergency, in place since the horrendous Paris attacks that killed 130 last November, would be set to conclude on July 26. So then, even with the state of emergency in place, and with it an increase in surveillance and military and police personnel patrolling the streets while French intelligence kept its ear close to detection of possible emerging attacks, such a monstrous event could occur.

Authorities understand that they are dealing with the unexpected and the volatile, a pathology of viral hatred motivated by sacred scripts that not only sanction violent jihad but demand it of the faithful. And the cult of death that motivates the faithful succeeds by inspiration; it is not for nothing that the ISIL propaganda online magazine is named Inspire. Where the description of a "human mowing machine" takes the imagination to the realm of considering human victims to be nothing more than blades of grass to be cut down and destroyed.

France's intelligence chief, addressing the internal security agency DGSI last week, presented a 300-page report by a French parliamentary commission relating to France's countering of Islamist terrorism and conjecture on the nature of future attacks. Patrick Calvar spoke of a new attack phase that he foresees for the future: "I'm convinced they'll go to booby-trapped vehicles and bombs, thus upping their power. We know very well they're going to use this mode of operating.

"They're going to end up sending commandos whose mission is to organize terrorist campaigns without necessarily going to the assault with death awaiting them", he stated, speaking of his theory that Islamists will begin to turn to techniques capable of killing greater numbers at a time, while sparing the lives of the attackers themselves.

He does seem to overlook the message of martyrdom and celebrity that accrues to success stories like that of Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel.

Depriving jihadis of the end-reward inherent in their purposeful attacks as they cry "Allahu Akbar!" appears to be the result of a Western mindset which cannot conceive of anyone willingly surrendering life for the greater good of Islam, slaughtering the faithless kuffar, Infidels and Jews, eliciting wild celebration throughout the Islamic world of like-minded upholders of the faith.