Theocons of the world, unite: a prominent pundit wants American conservatives to make common cause with Muslim reactionaries.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 - Book review

A FEW YEARS ago, I heard someone call into a right-wing radio show to rail against the feminists, the homosexuals, the atheists, and other usual suspects. The host enthusiastically agreed. The caller then voiced the hope that the host would join him in supporting the establishment of Islamic law in America, a twist that left the host sputtering incoherently.

These days, the idea of conservative Christians aligning themselves with radical Muslims is not a prank caller's gag but the subject of heated debate on the right. Dinesh D'Souza sparked the argument with his controversial book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (Random House).

D'Souza's thesis is that America's cultural left brought 9/11 upon us--not, as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell infamously suggested shortly after the event, by inviting the wrath of God, but by inviting the wrath of Muslims. How? Mainly by fostering "a decadent American culture that angers and repulses traditional societies" and by "waging an aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family and to promote secular values."

That's quite a change from the normal right-wing position in the West. In a column for the British Spectator shortly after 9/11, the conservative journalist and parliamentarian Boris Johnson also identified the liberation of women in the West as a principal cause of the anger of militant Islamists, but he came to a radically different conclusion than D'Souza did: "It is time for concerted cultural imperialism. They are wrong about women. We are right." At the time, Johnson seemed to speak for the most of the right.

Does The Enemy at Home represent a shift in attitude? Andrew Sullivan has been charging for some time that American "theoconservatives" have become a politicized "Christianist" movement with many similarities to Islamism (minus the suicide bombings). He sees D'Souza's book as a sign of an Islamist/Christianist merger. But to advance his thesis, Sullivan considerably exaggerates the welcome that D'Souza has received from conservatives.

So in January, when the Republican blogger Hugh Hewitt announced D'Souza's new book, Sullivan took note on his own blog with the short comment: "Together at last--as the Christianist-Islamist alliance deepens on the far right." Yet more recently, Hewitt's co-blogger Dean Barnett slammed The Enemy at Home as "intellectually obtuse, poorly informed and, most importantly, an irresponsible exercise...