Third, without the charge that “Islam is under attack” and that America is an atheist, immoral society, would radical Islam win so many recruits to its cause? These charges suffuse the rhetoric of Bin Laden and the leading thinkers of radical Islam. Sayyid Qutb, who has been called “the brains behind Bin Laden,” argues that America is the global leader of the unbelievers, seeking to install secular leaders in the Muslim world and impose its godless, corrupting values on Muslim society. While Hanson seems completely unaware of this extensive literature, it has an enormous resonance throughout the Middle East.

Moreover, if you think about it, what would cause an ordinary Muslim in Islamabad or Riyadh to go to his death in order to strike out against America? Because the Palestinians don’t have a state? I don’t think so. Because of Al Qaeda’s “incoherent rambling”? Not likely. On the other hand, tell a pious Muslim that the Great Satan seeking to destroy his faith and undermine the Muslim family and corrupt the innocence of his children, and now you have a plausible motive for why Muslims would feel a call to jihad.

Why then would an intelligent guy like Hanson react so petulantly to a book that shows how liberal policy and liberal values have strengthened the appeal of the Islamic radicals and emboldened them to strike out at us? Why would a conservative work so hard to cover up the left’s responsibility for 9/11?

The reason is that for the past five years Hanson and some other conservatives have been invested in a strategy to attack Islam an intolerant and illiberal, and in this way to recruit liberals over to the conservative side. It’s the old clash of civilizations thesis. The only problem is that this strategy has failed miserably. How many liberals have responded positively to conservative articles showing that Muslims are all a bunch of socially repressive, women-hating, gay-stoning fanatics? How many from the left have jumped aboard the Bush bandwagon? I count not a single convert to our cause.

Meanwhile, America is paying a high price for conservative attempts to depict the Muslim world—a world that includes 1 billion people most of whom live in democratic countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Turkey—as religiously bigoted and politically fanatical. These attacks on Islam and Muhammad and Muslim culture are having the predictable effect of alienating traditional Muslims and pushing them toward the radical camp. No wonder the moderate Muslims are reluctant to take the side of people who are always blasting their prophet and their religion.

Yet as their strategy continues to fail, Hanson and others become more desperate and are now trying to enforce conservative political correctness against independent voices like me who are calling for a new understanding and a new approach. Why else would a guy who knows me and is a colleague of mine at the Hoover Institution make the absurd accusation that I am justifying the 9/11 attacks and blaming “millions of Americans” for those attacks?

It’s time for conservatives to reject such attempts to cling to a collapsing orthodoxy. My book shows that there are two clashes of civilizations, one within the West and the other within the Muslim world. While the left in America is working in tandem with the radical Muslims to defeat Bush in Iraq, the right should ally with the traditional Muslims to thwart this “war against the war on terror.” The traditional Muslims are the one group that can help us defeat radical Islam, and we would see this if we stopped looking for allies in all the wrong places.