By CLIFF MAY, Scripps Howard News Service

During the 1990s, most of us thought we were living in a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity. We even spent the "peace dividend" -- cutting resources for intelligence and the military. The Cold War was over. We had no enemies worth worrying about. That was the accepted narrative of that giddy era.

Following the shootings of a Kansas abortion doctor and a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, two prominent New York Times columnists, Paul Krugman and Frank Rich, spoke out forcefully against those in the media who spout lies and, possibly, incite violence.

Ted Rall is hopping mad. The syndicated columnist and president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists is denouncing President Obama as "useless" and "dangerous," and he's demanding that Obama "step down now."

The war being waged against the West also is a war against modernity. For nearly a thousand years, Islam reigned supreme in much of the world. But with the coming of the modern era -- generally seen as beginning in the 18th century -- Christendom outpaced the Muslim world by almost every measure.

Oil is not just any commodity. It is a strategic commodity. Our military can't move without it. Our economy can't function without it. Regimes that have large amounts of oil lying under the lands they rule enjoy unearned wealth and power. Some -- Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia -- use that wealth and power in pursuit of nefarious goals.

"You're not going to like my saying this," Vice President Joe Biden recently told the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, but the Jewish state should not build more settlements on Palestinian territory, and should "dismantle existing outposts and allow Palestinians freedom of movement."

In September 1988, the Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie published "The Satanic Verses," a novel containing what some saw as an irreverent depiction of the prophet Mohamed.

When I was asked to appear on the Daily Show, the news-with-views-and-edgy comedy TV program, I was reluctant. The issue: whether "enhanced interrogation techniques" should be regarded as torture and those responsible prosecuted. How would Jon Stewart, the acerbic and unabashedly liberal host, make this issue funny? How would I make it serious?

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind behind the terrorist atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001. If U.S. intelligence operatives had spotted him in a remote area of Pakistan and killed him with a Predator missile, most people would have said: "That's justice."

Ask those on the left what values they champion and they will say equality, tolerance, women's rights, gay rights, workers rights and human rights. Militant Islamists oppose all that, not infrequently through the application of lethal force. So how does one explain the burgeoning left-Islamist alliance?