Notwithstanding the portrayal of the Islamic State (Isis) as new and horrifically different, it's essentially the continuation of the jihad bin Laden launched in the expectation it would rage for 100 years.
There is, however, one new twist with potentially far-reaching consequences.
Having emerged from the popular uprising against the Assad regime in Syria, Isis has drawn volunteers from Western countries like flies. Once thoroughly radicalised and having adopted "Jihadist John", the lead in Isis' snuff videos, as their role model, some of these volunteers are returning whence they came with instructions to unleash hell.
About half of the 500-odd Britons who went to Syria are believed to be back in the UK. This week MI5 revealed it had arrested four Londoners, one just back from Syria, who planned to carry out random beheadings. European intelligence agencies indicated this was the sixth plot involving returning jihadists uncovered in recent weeks.
Mehdi Nemmouche, a French national of Algerian descent who'd fought with Isis in Syria, is awaiting trial in Brussels on charges of murdering three people at the city's Jewish Museum in May. Much closer to home, on the eve of our recent election, Australian police arrested 15 Islamists allegedly planning "demonstration executions" on the streets of Sydney and Brisbane. It's possible that news persuaded some wavering voters that John Key's defence of intelligence oversight had more to recommend it than the claims big brother is watching us.
What if some of these plots succeed?
In Europe, the anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism right is already on the march. In the May European Parliament elections Marine Le Pen's Front National emerged as the largest party in France with 25 per cent of the vote. In Britain, Ukip (the UK Independence Party) won 24 of the 73 seats -- the only party other than Labour and the Conservatives to lead a UK-wide election in more than a century.
Polls show that, if a presidential election was held now, Le Pen would win the first round and easily defeat Socialist incumbent Francois Hollande in the second, although she'd lose to any of the likely centre-right candidates. These results suggest that the days when centre-left and centre-right voters tacitly joined forces to stymie the far-right, as happened to her father Jean-Marie in 2002, are gone.
Ukip was heavily favoured to win the Clacton byelection held overnight to gain its first seat in the House of Commons.
Even in Sweden the xenophobic Swedish Democrats surged in last month's election, winning 49 seats in the Riksdag.
It doesn't seem overly alarmist to expect support for these groups to rise if immigrant jihadists start performing acts of butchery in their adopted homelands to emphasise their loathing of Western values, among other things.
Public support for multiculturalism and large-scale immigration has always been open to question. The far-right narrative that both are uncontrolled social experiments carried out by the political class with little regard for public opinion isn't entirely without validity.
Enoch Powell's infamous 1968 Rivers of Blood speech referenced Virgil's epic poem talking of "wars, terrible wars and the Tiber foaming with much blood".
Isis foresees the same -- but with anticipation, rather than foreboding.
