"The victories of the Cold War – and the giddy speculation that history had reached the ideological terminus of liberal democracy – revived illusions of omnipotence among an Anglo-American political and media elite that has always known very little about the modern world it claims to have made. Consequently, almost every event since the end of the Cold War – the rise of radical Islam, of India and China, the assertiveness of oil-rich Russia, Iran and Venezuela – has come as a shock, a rude reminder that the natives of Delhi, Cairo and Beijing have geopolitical ambitions of their own, not to mention a sense of history marked by resentment and suspicion of the metropolitan West.

Interesting piece in the current edition of The Weekly Standard by Stephen Schwartz who casts a critical eye at the call earlier this week by Rowan Williams, who, because he is the Archbishop of Canterbury is the global leader of the Anglican Communion, for official recognition in Britain of sharia or Islamic religious law: What the archbishop ignored is that British Muslim radicals raise the demand for sharia as an ideological banner.... This requirement is spelled out, for instance, in the sharia volume A Code of Practice for Muslims in the West (1999), which quotes the moderate Iraqi Shia ayatollah Ali Sistani pronouncing that Muslims living in non-Muslim nations must commit themselves "to abide by the laws of that country," as they implicitly promise to do when they sign an immigration form.