Hitch:

If, as one must suspect, these bombs are only the first, then Britain will start to undergo the same tensions—between a retreat to insularity and clannishness of the sort recently seen in France and Holland, and the self-segregation of the Muslim minority in both those countries—that will start to infect other European countries as well. It is ludicrous to try and reduce this to Iraq. Europe is steadily becoming a part of the civil war that is roiling the Islamic world, and it will require all our cultural ingenuity to ensure that the criminals who shattered London's peace at rush hour this morning are not the ones who dictate the pace and rhythm of events from now on.

Always nice to hear from one of the few remaining intellectually honest leftists in the world.

After the Rodney King verdict there were riots in Los Angeles. My boyfriend—now my husband—called me and told me to stay put that night. I did, and I watched television all evening to stay on top of what was going on. (That was before the internet was widely available, at least in its present form.)

The next day I figured out how to take the freeway around the center of the city. I swung by work to collect my papers and headed to Glendale, where Attila the fiance lived. It wasn't clear how long the riots were going to last, so I went to Vons that afternoon to stock up on food. Although Glendale wasn't too close to the center of the city, we were going to stay inside until we saw actual law and order in L.A.

It was a scary time: a few homeowners in the Bohemian part of Venice had resisted the cultural pressure to not own guns. A few of these people took up posts on their roofs to keep the mostly black hoodlums from invading their homes.

In Koreatown, closer to the center of events, grocery store owner used bags of rice as sandbags to create perimeters around their businesses. These people had military-issue rifles, and each store had at least two men guarding it.

At Vons I got enough staples to last a few days. The line was very long; I could tell it would take around 45 minutes to get out of there. (And I'm an American: five minutes is a long time to wait for the checker in the grocery store.) In the meantime I talked to a black woman about what a terrible situation we were in. No one mentioned race, because it was understood then that the problem was hoodlums versus civilized people.

And so it is with muslims: the vast majority are decent, but those who are must be willing to condemn those who want to bring Western Civilization down.

There is no room for waffling, here. AQ wants to take us back to the 12th century.

And I'm not going.

You might want to take this moment to choose sides.