And no one saw it coming? The French riots: the burning, the looting, and now, the killing that make you just sad enough, perhaps, to bump freedom fries from the menu and reinstate French fries, out of a fraternal sympathy the French have piggishly denied the Americans since the Iraq war began.

 On the other hand, it's not just the French.

 Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear next year a plea against the use of military tribunals to try terror suspects.

 "Our country is at war," the president sought to remind his countrymen at a press conference the same day. At war on the battlefield; otherwise imprisoned in a mental morass. Witness the glee with which liberals and assorted W-phobes have assailed their country's headman for "lying" the country into war -- which he didn't, operating rather on the same unfortunately flawed information that every other world leader judged credible concerning weapons of mass destruction. Anyway, there you are. During a war, the commander in chief has to remind us the war is on.

 A kind of nuttiness overtakes us -- as the French, our persistent critics from the time the Iraq war came onto radar screens, were overtaken by blindness as to their own condition.

 Accommodating Europe's largest Muslim population, the French could be said to have their hand stuck out for a ruler-slap or a knife stroke -- depending on the mood of the militants. Three hundred French towns -- not counting the suburbs of Paris -- struck by rioting! If not war, it certainly has the right look.

 "War over what?" is the question. War over the indigestibility of the Muslim morsel that the West has been trying for several decades to ingest with hope and a glass of water. It's not working.

 Professor Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilization" thesis looks more and more plausible as time goes by. One factor in that category nevertheless needs more discussion than it has received -- the religious factor: not Christianity against Islam; rather, passionless secularism against passionate discontent and despair, often enough presented in religious terms. Continued...