Real and imagined terror stalks a jittery Europe

Paris

THE antics of a flash mob sparked panic on a Spanish beach earlier this week, revealing the hair-trigger anxiety that has gripped Europeans following a wave of terror attacks.

"We are made to suffer doubly: not only feeling this fear . . . but also a sense of disarray from being caught in an infernal cycle that can't be stopped," author Edouard Louis and philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie wrote in the French daily Liberation.

France has seen a series of jihadist attacks over the past year and a half.

Last month, a truck massacre in Nice on Bastille Day was followed less than a fortnight later by the grisly murder of a priest near the northern city of Rouen.

Then on Wednesday in London, a knife attack by a Norwegian of Somali origin that left an American woman dead and five wounded was followed by hours of uncertainty over whet…