As we sort through the implications of Umar Farouk Abdulmultallab's alleged attempt to incinerate a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day, we're bound to hear a great deal about "the war on terror" and how it is or isn't being waged.
We're also going to have to assimilate the confounding facts that Abdulmultallab converted to Salafism -- Islam's fundamentalist and puritanical variant -- not in his native Nigeria but in London. He was apparently drawn to Yemen, where his suicide mission was conceived, by sermons and texts posted on the Internet, and it was there, on Monday, that Al Qaeda's Arabian peninsula organization hailed him as a hero.
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