Still stunned in the wake of the terrorist bombings in Mecca, all nations of the world are bracing for an uncertain future. In Islamic countries, enraged mobs have destroyed France's embassies, consulates, and cultural and business offices. According to preliminary estimates, as many as ten thousand French nationals have met horrible deaths in a week of killing frenzy. France, where ten percent of the population comprises Muslims from North Africa, has declared a state of martial law. Soccer fields have been converted to emergency holding camps after the mass arrests of rampaging protesters in the suburbs of the major cities. The Front National, Mr. Le Pen's neo-nationalist party, has gone underground after having claimed responsibility for the attack on the holy city. In a written communiqué to Le Figaro, Mr. Le Pen declared that he was calling for a croisade---the French word for jihad---against the invasion of France by infidels from North Africa who refuse to convert to Catholicism, do not drink wine, and insist on living by their heathen ways.

In Riyadh, the royal family has called for a jihad against France and has severed all diplomatic and economic ties with that country. But in a speech at the university, Sheikh Ali Baba, scholar and former Minister of Education, hinted that Islamism may be paying the price of past imperialism and belligerence, the continuing practice of slavery, the destruction of Christian holy sites, and the violent eradication of other religions. He mentioned in particular Abd-er-Rahman's invasion of the Frankish kingdom in 732, which was stopped at Poitiers by one Charles Martel. The sheikh added that this egregious, unwarranted attack on a nascent nation had etched a persistent resentment in the French collective memory. He went on to suggest that, instead of a war of revenge, the jihad should be redefined as a peaceful effort to fund education about Islamic law and government in western countries and to eradicate global poverty, starting with the donation of tents, food, and shopping carts to the homeless of the world. Rumors that the sheikh's head will be on public display in Riyadh have not been confirmed at this time.

Bad fiction too often stems from the strangest of realities, which brings us to the subject of Mr. Clinton's recent speech at Georgetown University. Before an audience of students, Sheikh Bubba demonstrated his perfect command of history, world affairs, and non sequiturs by finding causes for the attack on the WTC in the sins of Americans and their European ancestors, to wit, slavery, the Indian Wars, and the First Crusade. After intimating that Gen. W. T. Sherman may have been a terrorist, he then delivered the habitual litany of platitudes: a lot of people have a view of the world different from ours; it is cheaper for us to fund the schooling of children in the Third World than to go to war; we are vulnerable to terrorism because of global interdependence; we should promote freedom and democracy around the world and reduce global poverty; we need to initiate a debate with the Muslim world. Apparently forgetting that less than a year ago he had been president for eight years, he deplored the federal agencies' deficiencies in the domestic war on terrorism and the control of immigration---his INS administrator turned the agency into a welcome committee for illegal aliens. His cryptic closing remarks concerned "the nature of truth," a subject to which he has undoubtedly given much thought, starting with his famous questioning of the meaning of "is."

The intellectual indigence of the speech just confirms what we already knew. Mr. Clinton has never been noted for his creative mind or his achievements, only for his propensity for dissembling. His representation of Sherman as a terrorist is just another preposterous item out of the blame-America book. Sherman did not set as an objective the random killing of civilians. By ordering the methodical destruction of the infrastructure and sources of supplies useful to the enemy, he just waged war the way war must be waged for a decisive and quick end. But Mr. Clinton would stop at nothing to appeal to New-Age sensibilities and historical revisionism. Similarly, his impossible suggestion that we should fund children's schooling around the world is silly, and should not even appeal to the aging goo-goos of the sixties. Is he proposing to finance Taliban-like Islamic schools? And what about a "debate" with the Islamic world? What would be debated? Does anyone remember anything Mr. Clinton's national debate on race achieved, besides providing a national forum to the usual bash-America rabble?

Mr. Clinton's reference to the First Crusade and associated misdeeds, the story of which "is still being told today in the Middle East," and for which "we are still paying," gets the cake. Why we should pay for an event that occurred more than six centuries before the birth of the United States does not make any sense. And if Islamic terrorism were payback for the First Crusade, planes would have been crashed into the Eiffel Tower and not the WTC. It may be news to Mr. Clinton, but the leaders of the crusade were French---Godefroy de Bouillon (Duke of Lower Lorraine), Hugues de Vermandois (brother of the King of France), and Raymond de Saint-Gilles (Count of Toulouse).

To any observer of the Clinton presidency, there is no puzzlement over the mention of the First Crusade. Mr. Clinton is a Johnny-one-note whose only vision of the world is that of a campaigner. Cultivating and exploiting grudges was a pivotal element of his quest for popularity when he was running for office as well as when he was in office. He played the race card, the class card, and any other card of the demagogic deck. Now that he is retired, still bereft of any spirit of statesmanship, still in pursuit of a legacy, he is up to his old campaign trick, the only one he knows, looking for grudges and making them up as needed. Hence, the allusion to the First Crusade, also an indirect swipe at the Jesuits, surely to get the favor of campus nit-pickers steeped in political correctness. Pathetic.