Before one horrific terrorist crime has had time to become legally resolved, another mass-murder, with both political and racist undertones, is shaking Europe. And the common methods are becoming ever clearer amongst all the madness. Regardless of ideology, these offenders systematically use social media to spread their message of a coming Armageddon, while attempting to fix their crimes in a historical context that, with its knights and holy war, is more evocative of the fantasy genre than something that really happened in the past.

The latest addition to the infamous group of political mass murderers is Mohamed Merah, who, at the end of March, shot dead seven people in France; of these, four people of Jewish ancestry were killed for that very reason. Like many other contemporary terrorists, Merah’s claims seem to have been far from modest. He seemed convinced that he would, in the future, become a hero and role model for generations of Islamist...