No family of an American hostage has ever been prosecuted for paying a ransom for the return of their loved ones. The last thing we should ever do is to add to a family's pain.

Kafka would surely have been impressed by the twin ambitions of the modern empathetic state: the need to set up hyper-regulatory bodies preventing you from doing anything yourself, while simultaneously endowing lavish pseudo-agencies to hand out leaflets listing a 1-800 number you can dial to order more leaflets.

In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter?

Hollywood gave us far more Muslim terrorists in the Eighties and Nineties than it has since 9/11.

When nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, the Left was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute, and the handful of us who survived would be walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now anyone with a few thousand bucks and an unlisted number in Islamabad in his Rolodex can get a nuke, and the Left couldn't care less.

The Western front is the important one in this war - the intersection between Islam and a liberal democratic tradition so mired in self-loathing it would rather destroy our civilization just to demonstrate its multicultural bona fides.

How ridiculous! You're going to have the first black president apologize for slavery?