At least 22 people were injured after an improvised explosive device detonated aboard a London Underground train on Friday. The crude bomb–apparently contained in a white bucket wrapped in a plastic bag–went off as the train was leaving toward central London from Parsons Green station, 15 minutes from where I live. Several victims suffered flash burns while others were crushed in the stampede that ensued.

Across the English Channel, meanwhile, a hammer-wielding assailant struck two women in the eastern French town of Chalon-sur-Saone. The women survived. The attacker had shouted Allahu Akbar.

This is the West’s new normal.

Some officials wish we would put up with terrorism much as we accept other urban nuisances such as traffic, vermin, and pickpocketing. Recall former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls’s words following the Nice truck attack in July 2016 that killed 86: “Times have changed, and we should learn to live with terrorism.” According to the Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg, former President Obama liked to remind his staff that Americans are more likely to die from slipping in their bathtubs than from terror attacks.

But these glib assertions can never calm people frightened of taking the Tube or boarding a plane, knowing there is always chance, however slight, of something going boom or gunshots ringing out to cries of Allahu Akbar! Bathtub slips may be more deadly, statistically speaking, but they are by definition accidental. They don’t possess that malign, war-like aspect that defines modern Islamic terrorism.

Nowadays when you step into a Tube train, you are aware that you are entering a battleground. Even the most enlightened, progressive commuter can’t help but notice the woman in the burka or that young man with the long beard scowling in one corner of the carriage. The sight raises a dozen anxious questions and emotions. Now, statistically speaking, that woman or that young man is just “trying to get on with life.” But as the French philosopher Pierre Manent wrote in his book Beyond Radical Secularism:

The immense majority of our Muslim citizens have nothing to do with terrorism, but terrorism would not be what it is, it would not have the same reach nor the same significance, if the terrorists did not belong to this population and were not our fellow citizens. These terrorist acts would simply be odious crimes subject to ordinary justice if they were not guided by an aim of war and by the intent to ruin the very possibility of a common life.

So long as a small but significant minority of Muslims takes a war footing against the West, terror will persist, and no amount of statistical sophistry and empty rhetoric from leaders will assuage legitimate fear.