Radical Islamists find sympathetic friends among Christian fundamentalists.

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Chiding Bush for urging Muslims to embrace a version of liberty that includes the “freedom of Larry Flynt to produce pornography and of Salman Rushdie to publish The Satanic Verses,” Buchanan wrote, “If conservatives reject the ‘equality’ preached by Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, NARAL and the National Organization for Women, why seek to impose it on the Islamic world? Why not stand beside Islam, and against Hollywood and Hillary?”

In effect, D’Souza, Colson, Buchanan and company agree with the familiar sentiment that the terrorists “hate us for our freedoms.” Their conclusion, however, is that those freedoms should be curbed—though they would say that they are talking not about freedom itself but its excesses. According to D’Souza, those excesses include the notion that “men and women should have the same roles in society” or that “freedom of expression includes the right to publish material that is sexually explicit or blasphemous.”

Yet there is no reason to believe that Islamic radicals or even most Muslim traditionalists oppose merely the “excesses” of, say, women’s liberation rather than the basic notion of female equality. The Enemy at Home includes a sympathetic discussion of Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb’s critique of America’s moral decadence, but D’Souza neglects to mention that this critique was based on Qutb’s stay in the United States in the notoriously licentious period of 1948 to 1950.

Radical Islamists’ ire is directed not just at The Vagina Monologues but at beauty pageants, and they have often responded violently even to moderate steps toward the emancipation of women. Nor does D’Souza say much about the hostility not only toward secularism but toward other religions that is prevalent in the Muslim world today.

The Enemy at Home targets not just the cultural left but the anti-Muslim right—conservatives such as Robert Spencer, author of Islam Unveiled, who argue that Islam itself is inherently violent, oppressive, and prone to breeding terrorists. “There is probably no better way to repel traditional Muslims, and push them into the radical camp, than to attack their religion and their prophet,” writes D’Souza, and on this point he is on to something—not just with regard to “traditionalist Muslims” but to moderate Muslims as well. Spencer’s critique of D’Souza in the neoconservative webzine FrontPage illustrates the problem with anti-Islamic polemics: Spencer cites the atrocities perpetuated by medieval Muslim armies in Jerusalem, Constantinople, and other conquered cities as evidence that barbaric “jihadism” is endemic to Islam, without acknowledging that the Christian crusaders’ actions were at least as bad.

Yet D’Souza’s critique of Spencer falls flat because he shares some of the same basic assumptions—for instance, that Islam is inherently incompatible with secularism and is inherently “fundamentalist” in the sense of relying on a literal reading of the Koran. It’s just that, for D’Souza, these are not vices but virtues. The anti-Muslims regard secularized but Islamic Turkey as an anomaly; so does D’Souza, who writes mostly with approval of the push to reverse Turkey’s secularization: “Muslims have the right to live in Islamic states under Muslim law if they wish.”

It is quite true that, in the age of militant Islamic terrorism, it is not very helpful to tell millions of peaceful Muslims that their religion is inherently violent, evil, and oppressive. It is equally unhelpful of D’Souza to deny the obvious: The best hope for peaceful coexistence is for the Islamic world to embrace modernization and individual liberty, not for the West to turn its back on those values.

CATHY YOUNG IS A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR AT REASON MAGAZINE AND A COLUMNIST AT THE BOSTON GLOBE. SHE IS THE AUTHOR OF GROWING UP IN MOSCOW: MEMORIES OF A SOVIET GIRLHOOD.