French different way of fighting terror failed them

NY Times:

...After 9/11, the Americans threw enormous resources of manpower, money and computer time into the “global war on terrorism,” which was also about tracking the potential terrorist at home, in a country with a tiny and mostly well-integrated Muslim population. The French, with a colonial history, have been dealing with terrorism (and Islam) for much longer. With the largest number of Muslims in Europe — nearly 10 percent of the population, often concentrated in poorer neighborhoods — and closer proximity to the Middle East and North Africa, France has focused more on preventing the recruitment of potential terrorists through a regular infiltration of mosques and radical Islamic networks. 

Partly because of their history and partly because of more limited budgets, the French rely more on human contacts, local intelligence and human resources and less on automated phone tapping and surveillance than the Americans do. That can make the French well informed but less systematic, less able to “connect the dots” than the Americans, who have tried to learn from their own failure to uncover the 9/11 plot before it happened. In general, Judge Trévidic said, the French have one-tenth of the resources of the Americans for any given case....“France has a very aggressive system, and before 9/11 they were centralizing the intelligence process and fixing laws to let them grab people very early to disrupt anything in advance,” says Gary Schmitt, an intelligence expert and resident scholar in security studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “They do a lot of things, including telephone intercepts, that make the Patriot Act look namby-pamby. In the U.S., we talk of pre-emption in military terms, but the French talk of it on the home front, to discover plots and conspiracies.”...

You could see how aggressive that system was with the arrest of 19 only days after the siege that ended in the killer's death.  It looked from this distance like a preemptive operation against anyone who may have been associated with the killer or who may have suggested similar intent.

What I found curious was the reaction of the French Muslim community.  Instead of showing outrage at the acts of this terrorist they acted like someone who feared being a victim of retribution.  I have seen that type of reaction in other cases of Muslim terror.  It makes you wonder where is the outrage at what people are doing in the name of their religion.