Opinion Mark SteynA few years back, in London, I caught a delightfully bad lounge act who specialised in a blithely bouncy cheerfulness when it came to even the most lugubrious lyric. He sang the theme from M*A*S*H - you remember, the TV show about the Korean war that was really about the Vietnam war and ran longer than the Hundred Years War.
Johnny Mandel's theme music was wistful and ambiguous on the sitcom, and accompanied by landing choppers. But in that little boîte in Knightsbridge, our singer was entirely unperturbed by the dark lessons of war.
He shrugged off Mike Altman's lyric with a careless finger-snappy breeziness: Suicide is painless/It brings on many changes/And I can take or leave it if I please. Yeah, baby. Since 9/11, confronted by the smug indestructible conventional wisdom of the multiculti counter-tribalists in America and Europe, I've often found that loopily swingin' "Suicide is painless" swimming up from the recesses of my memory.
"Civilisations die from suicide, not murder," wrote Arnold Toynbee in his now mostly forgotten work on the subject. But surely it's never been embraced quite so insouciantly as by our present-day elites.
Guantanamo is denounced around the world as the gulag to end all gulags because of shocking torture revelations such as this: "A female interrogator took an unusual approach to wear down a detainee, reading a Harry Potter book aloud for hours. He turned his back and put his hands over his ears."
If you've been in a bookstore this last 72 hours, you'll know how he feels. Good grief, couldn't the Yank torturers have been more culturally sensitive and read from The Collected Works Of Robert Fisk? Ten minutes of that and I'd sing like a canary.
If J K Rowling is the Torquemada de nos jours, nothing should surprise us. Nonetheless, even in my jaded state, I was taken aback by the remarks of Andrew Jaspan, editor of the Melbourne Age, one of Australia's biggest newspapers. You'll recall that Douglas Wood, an Aussie taken hostage in Iraq, was recently rescued - and immediately apologised to John Howard and President Bush for a video statement he'd made during his capture calling for the withdrawal of coalition forces.
No apology necessary: obviously such demands are made under duress, and it's only the media's insistence on treating them as a serious contribution to foreign policy analysis that gives them any currency whatsoever. He then went on to describe his captors as "a--holes".
The Age's editor didn't care for this brusque mean-spirited judgmentalism. As Mr Jaspan told Australia's ABC network, "I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas Wood's use of the a--hole word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill thought through and I think demeans the man and is one of the reasons why people are slightly sceptical of his motives and everything else. The issue really is largely, speaking as I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day and, as such, to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive."
And, heaven forbid, we're insensitive about "insurgents". True, a blindfolded Mr Wood had to listen to his captors murder two of his colleagues a few inches away, but how crude and boorish would one have to be to hold that against one's hosts?
The liberation of Douglas Wood is surely a first: he didn't get "Stockholm syndrome", but everyone back home did. What's with this guy anyway? They fed him every day and, if they'd ever got around to sawing his head off, they'd have got out the nice sharp scimitar not the old rusty thing they used for Ken Bigley. Like, why's he so totally insensitive? Is he a Bush supporter or something?
The other fellow in this story who hasn't got Stockholm syndrome is, in fact, from Stockholm. Mr Wood's fellow hostage, Ulf Hjertstrom from Sweden, has decided to operate on that even more "insensitive" and "coarse" principle of don't get mad, get even. "I have now put some people to work to find these bastards," he told Australian TV. "I invested about $50,000 so far and we will get them one by one."
"The sooner the better," agreed Mr Wood.
"These scum should be put out of business," added Mr Hjertstrom, evidently some Nordic Rambo insufficiently grateful for his couple of months on the Halal diet.
I'd be happy to chip in to Sylvester Stockholm's get-the-bastards fund. It'll do more good than most tsunami donations. The head-hackers have murdered dopey peaceniks and female aid workers and, of course, hundreds of Iraqi Muslims.
Ted Kennedy says: "Our military and the insurgents are fighting for the same thing - the hearts and minds of the people." Detonating the hearts, minds and other organs over a shopping market seems an odd way of doing it.
Meanwhile, the Guardian's response to Britain's plucky suicide bombers was to take on Dilpazier Aslam, a fellow Yorkshire Muslim, as a "trainee journalist".
Judging from his first column, Mr Aslam doesn't need much in the way of journalistic training. He mocks the idea that anyone could be "shocked" at a group of Yorkshiremen blowing up London. "The Muslim community is no monolithic whole," he explains. "Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don't-rock-the boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We're much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks."
Though the Guardian didn't care to inform its readers of their trainee's bona fides, he turns out to be a member of Hizb-ut-Tahir, "Britain's most radical Islamic group" (as the Guardian itself described it) which, among its other "sassy" opinions, "urges Muslims to kill Jewish people" (according to the BBC).
Fellow Guardian employee David Foulkes, who was killed in the Edgware Road blast, would no doubt be honoured to have died for the cause of Muslim "sassiness".
Those we erroneously call "liberal" have no stomach for the defence of liberalism - not if it involves reading Harry Potter to terrorists or calling them "a--holes" (a term properly reserved for disparaging Bush and Cheney) or objecting to their murdering your colleagues.
The Islamists can't win, but we can lose - all by ourselves.