How much worse will Islamist terrorism in Europe get?  According to French scholar Gilles Kepel of the Sciences Po institute, it is likely to get so much worse that European states fall into civil war over government inability to stop it.

Professor Gilles Kepel, from the Sciences Po in Paris, France, said a growing ‘Jihad Generation’ is likely to continue to carry out terror acts in European cities.  The aim of their terror activity is to both incite hatred towards Muslims and, in doing so, cause further radicalisation among young people, the professor of political science said.

He told the German newspaper Die Welt that this in turn could lead to the point where Europe enters into civil war.

Specifically, Kepel is concerned that this continual wave of terror attacks cannot be effectively stopped by traditional policing methods.  The French government seems to agree, as French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said this week that there would definitely be more successful attacks even though his government is stopping attacks “every day.”

Partially this is because police do not have anything like the resources they would need.  The numbers of Muslims on terrorism watch lists in France alone tops 15,000, having tripled in recent months.  It takes many police officers to establish a full-time watch on one particular suspect.  The French have far less capacity to watch these suspects than does the American FBI, and even they have only “a few dozen” surveillance teams — far too few to watch the thousand-plus suspected Islamic terrorists here.  There is simply no way for police work alone to deal with so large a problem.

Thus, terrorist acts on the scale of the recent Paris attacks are likely to continue, and the European populations will eventually find it intolerable.  They will then move to expel Islam from Europe by endorsing right wing parties, Kepel says, and that will lead to the civil wars he fears.

Nor will that be the end of the violence.  The Islamist radicals will not be satisfied with destabilizing Europe, in Kepel’s view.  They will want to build an Islamic society from the wreckage:

The long-term goal of the Jihad Generation is to destroy Europe through civil war and then build an Islamic society from the ashes, Prof. Kepel said. The strategy is similar to the expansion of Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, and Libya where the terrorist organisation was able to use the chaos of civil war to slowly build its forces, grow in power, and rapidly seize territory.

There are things that can be done to lessen the danger, according to Professor Kepel.  One of the main ones is that Islamic leaders should reject Salafism, a form of Islam that requires a kind of disconnection from the secular states characteristic of contemporary Europe.  Kepel proposes that Islamic scholars have a “duty” to reject Salafism, and that most are failing this duty by remaining silent in the face of a rising tide of this ideological movement.

The young are particular persuaded by Salafi ideas, according to Breitbart, as also are thought to be the recent immigrant wave from the crises in the Middle East.  They point out that Germany has begun to raid Salafi preachers, targeting some 45,000 in recent months.  But of course that returns our attention to the scale of the problem.  Raiding 45,000 homes is possible.  Monitoring 45,000 preachers full time is probably quite beyond the resources of any European state, and possibly beyond even the United States.