Mark Steyn begins his weekly Chicago Sun-Times column with a look at the blinkered coverage of the torture/muders of Sebastien Selam and Ilan Halimi: "Needing to wake up, West just closes its eyes." He moves on to consider European attitudes to Iran and Israel. He arrives at a destination suggesting submission:

Islam claims universal jurisdiction and always has. The only difference is that they're now acting upon it. The signature act of the new age was the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran: Even hostile states generally respect the convention that diplomatic missions are the sovereign territory of their respective countries. Tehran then advanced to claiming jurisdiction over the citizens of sovereign states and killing them -- as it did to Salman Rushdie's translators and publishers. Now in the cartoon jihad and other episodes, the restraints of Islamic law are being extended piecemeal to the advanced world, by intimidation and violence but also by the usual cooing promotion of a spurious multicultural "respect" by Bill Clinton, the United Church of Canada, European foreign ministers, etc.

The I'd-like-to-teach-the-world-to-sing-in-perfect-harmonee crowd have always spoken favorably of one-worldism. From the op-ed pages of Jutland newspapers to les banlieues of Paris, the Pan-Islamists are getting on with it.

This past November I interviewed Mark Bowden about his forthcoming (May 2006) book on the Iranian hostage crisis. I asked Bowden if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- the president of Iran -- was involved in the hostage seizure. Bowden told me that his reporting establishes that Ahmadinejad was one of the central figures in the student group that planned the seizure and took over the American embassy. Initially Ahmadinejad supported the takeover of the Soviet embassy, but he changed his view when Khomeni endorsed the takeover of the American embassy the evening of the takeover.

Given his position with the student group, Bowden surmises that Ahmadinejad was one of its ringleaders. Moreover, he was identified as one of the group's ringleaders by every one of the dozen or so hostage takers Bowden interviewed in Tehran last year before Ahmadinejad became president. (Bowden disregards as ambiguous the photograph of the Ahmadinejad lookalike with a hostage.)

Last June Spiegel Online published an interview former hostage David Roeder. Consistent with Bowden's research, Roeder recalled that Ahmadinejad was "present at at least a third of my personal interrogations, which took place nightly for a little over a month early on in the hostage-taking situation. He seemed to be calling the shots, but from the background. The interrogators would ask a question and it would then be translated from Farsi into English by a woman interpreter." The Spiegel interviewer then asked Roeder whether his interlocutors exerted pressure on him in these interviews. Roeder responded:

I decided that initially I wasn't going to respond in any way, shape or form. They had me handcuffed to a chair and at least during the first few sessions, blindfolded as well. But once the blindfold came off, they had developed a plan that Ahmadinejad was instigating. Because I was not cooperating, they threatened that they were going to kidnap my handicapped son and send various pieces of him -- fingers and toes is what they mentioned -- to my wife if I didn't start cooperating. You don't forget somebody who is involved in something like that.

Roeder isn't sleeping, but Steyn seems to have a point about the rest of us. One would think, among other things, that the United States has a debt of honor to settle with Iran's odious president.