Germany's foiled bomb plot involved terrorists who defied any attempts at interdiction -- two seemingly normal Muslism students who suddenly turned radical. Only design flaws kept Jihad Hamad and Youssef el Hajdib from creating another Madrid or London scenario in Germany's mass-transit system, and German authorities still have no clue how to identify the next do-it-yourself jihadis:

But who in fact is Hamad? An Islamist who deliberately learned German at a language school in Tripoli so that he could enter the country as a student, essentially under the radar of counterterrorism officials, and calmly go about preparing an underhanded terrorist attack? Or did a young man, hungry for education, arrive in Germany on Jan. 2, 2006 and, for some unknown reason, suddenly and without attracting attention, turn into a killer?

By last Friday, investigators still hadn't found answers to these questions. ... The arrest of Youssef Hajdib, 21, promptly set off a security debate over the consequences of the presumed change in the overall threat of terrorism in Germany. Legislators called for more surveillance cameras in public areas (although even London's dense network of such cameras failed to prevent the 2005 bombings in that city), beefing up the country's police forces and internal intelligence agency and speeding up a planned effort to link all security-related information to a central counterterrorism database. One member of the German parliament, the Bundestag, even proposed stationing armed "rail marshals" on German trains in the future.

But whatever Schäuble and his counterparts in the state governments decide at a conference of interior ministers scheduled for Monday, and whatever measures they take, the one thing that has investigators especially concerned is that would-be attackers may not necessarily be members of a local "domestic terrorist organization," but simply Muslim fanatics acting entirely on their own. This presumed new breed of independent terrorists, officials believe, appear out of nowhere and form miniature cells of their own. Instead of a network and commanders, all they need is a reason to strike, bomb-building instructions they can easily download from the Internet and the conviction that they are acting on behalf of a greater cause. In some sense, these self-made terrorists may also believe that they are part of al-Qaida, which has long since transformed itself from being only a terrorist organization, instead encompassing an entire ideology.

This sounds familiar to the experiences of the British in the successful 7/7 London plot and the foiled sky-attack mission that the British uncovered this month, as well as the Toronto cell of homegrown jihadis. In this case, though Hamad and Hajdib aren't homegrown. They both came to Germany as students, in a manner similar to some of the 9/11 hijackers. If the Germans want to try detecting these plots early, they may want to start looking at their student-visa programs from Muslim nations.

Hamad's family tells the same story that British families and neighbors told about the suspects in the sky plot. Hamad only wanted to study languages, his mother tells Der Spiegel. "We have a pure son," she tells the reporter -- from behind her veil. His parents sent him to a Christian school, an unusual bit of background for a jihadi, but it did little to blunt his radicalism.

Besides, his parents hardly set a great example. Lebanese officials had a tap on the father, who belongs to the same Hizb-al-Tahrir group that claimed to have established the new Caliphate in Gaza. They heard him tell his son to get out of Germany as soon as he came under suspicion of the bombing attempt.

One might think that German security forces would have some investigation into the background of student visa applicants. If they had asked the Lebanese government, they might have discovered that Jihad Hamad came from a family tradition of jihadism. This additional information renders the mother's tearful insistence that her boy couldn't possibly be an extremist -- a claim made behind a veil -- almost laughable, if the subject wasn't so deadly serious.

Western nations have to understand that Islamofascists do not target them for their foreign policy; they target the West because it isn't Islamic. We need to start taking that threat seriously and performing tough investigations before offering visas to people from nations known to house terrorist organizations. Allowing the son of a Hizb-al-Tahrir officer into the country on a student visa seems very foolish, and if the Germans want to stop terrorist attacks, it has to stop that kind of foolishness as a first step towards sanity.

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