The Brussels attacks left at least 30 people dead at the city's international airport and a subway station adjacent to the European Union headquarters -- the symbolism could scarcely be more potent.

President Obama's slow-but-steady strategy to defeat the Islamic State is clawing back a little territory in Syria and Iraq but is doing nothing to dent the charismatic appeal of the militant group, disrupt its propaganda or prevent it from killing Europeans.

 "We can't allow terrorists to intimidate us into abandoning our values and humanitarian obligations," she said. As for Cruz, "loose canons tend to misfire."  Trump's day before idea to diminish NATO was greeted by.." If, Mr. Trump has his way, it will be like Christmas at the Kremlin."

 Mrs. Clinton proposed short-term steps for European nations and for the US. However, she noted, "It would be a serious mistake to stumble into another costly ground war in the Middle East," she said, "If we've learned anything from Iraq and Afghanistan, it's that people and nations have to secure their own communities."

Shorter version:  Not the best idea to make Belgium waffles glow in the dark or carpet bomb Belgian chocolate shops. Or to string Muslims up with Belgian lace around the neck until they tell us all they don't know.

There is a Dutch saying, "Dat is ver van mijn bed": "That is far from my bed." As long as Molenbeek's many issues inconvenienced only its residents, the government was willing to ignore it.

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." - Mark Twain

"To those who say hate does not give birth to love, I reply that it is love, human love, that often engenders hate." - the anarchist Emma Goldman

Imagine it. A network of violent radicals is picking off the world's leaders one by one. They have killed the American President, the Russian head of state, the French President, the Austrian head of state, and the Spanish Prime Minister.

Bomb attacks are ripping through the world's richest cities: explosions devastate Wall Street, the London Underground, a theatre in Barcelona, cafés in Paris, parades in Moscow. There is panic, and governments launch programmes of torture and deportation targeted at immigrant communities. Yet still the radicals wash defiantly across the world, killing as they go. They say they have "only one aim, one science: destruction".

Does this anarchism bear any relationship to the jihadists who bomb the very same targets today? When the film-maker Joe Bullman got young British Muslims with some sympathy for the 7/7 bombers to read the words of anarchists put on trial at the Old Bailey a century ago, they showed an exhilarated recognition. Adam Munevar Khan says: "It was written 100 years ago, but it is happening today...

The Belgian state broadcaster RTBF is reporting that two of the suspected terrorist suicide-bombers at Brussels airport were Khalid and Ibrahim el-Bakraoui.

The Belgian el-Bakraoui brothers were well-known to the police as longstanding criminals in the Belgian capital and more recently it emerged they had clear links to November's Paris attacks.

This connection to the Paris attacks and to recent police raids in Brussels, in which some suspects escaped from police, is a very significant development. If the Brussels bombers prove to be part of the same cell as the Paris attackers, this will raise serious questions about potential police and intelligence failings.

The network of agile and semiautonomous cells shows the reach of the extremist group in Europe even as it loses ground in Syria and Iraq. The officials, including European and Iraqi intelligence officials and a French lawmaker who follows the jihadi networks, described camps in Syria, Iraq and possibly the former Soviet bloc where attackers are trained to attack the West. Before being killed in a police raid, the ringleader of the Nov. 13 Paris attacks claimed he had entered Europe in a multinational group of 90 fighters, who scattered "more or less everywhere."

Call the terrorists "Muslim" if you have to characterize them, not "Islamic" or even worse, "Islamics." There is no such thing as "Islamic" terrorism. The word "Islamic" has to do with the ideals and verities of the religion of Islam, and is analogous to "Judaic." There are Muslim criminals and Muslim terrorists, just as there are Jewish criminals and Jewish terrorists. But there are no Judaic terrorists, and there aren't any Islamic ones either. But it is all right just to call them terrorists or cultists.

TrevorBolder: "Radical Islam does not compare to Fundamentalist Christian[.] In number, in hatred, in actions. NONE[.]"

And you know this to be the case -- how, exactly? Because that news would most likely come as a surprise to:

• Those persons who so happened to be at the Sikh Temple in the Milwaukee suburb of Oak Creek, WI on the afternoon of August 5, 2012 (6 dead);
  
• The families of late Drs. John Britton, Barnett Slepian and George Tiller (3 dead in three separate assassinations of abortion providers in 1994, 1998 and 2009, respectively);
  
• The families of the late Planned Parenthood clinic receptionists Shannon Lowney and Lee Ann Nichols (2 dead in Brookline, MA bombing on Dec. 30, 1994);
  
• The family of the late Denver talk radio host Alan Berg (Ambushed and shot dead in June 18, 1984);
  
• The thousands of people who were in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park on the evening of July 27, 1996 (1 dead and 111 wounded);
  
• Parents and family who attended a chidrems play at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church in Knoxville on July 27, 2008 (2 dead and 7 wounded); and
  
• The survivors of the Oklahoma City Bombing on the morning of April 19, 1995 (168 dead and over 600 wounded).

By now it is abundantly clear that the terrorists who work for the Islamic State think, cooperate and operate across borders, ignoring national boundaries. The increasingly urgent question for Europe in its struggle against them is, Can it do the same?

BRUSSELS -- As a dragnet aimed at Islamic State operatives spiraled across Brussels and into at least five European countries on Friday, the authorities were also focusing on a narrower but increasingly alarming threat: the vulnerability of Belgium's nuclear installations.

The investigation into this week's deadly attacks in Brussels has prompted worries that the Islamic State is seeking to attack, infiltrate or sabotage nuclear installations or obtain nuclear or radioactive material. This is especially worrying in a country with a history of security lapses at its nuclear facilities, a weak intelligence apparatus and a deeply rooted terrorist network.