The taboo against religion is tougher because it joins leftist political correctness with the right's veneration of religion. The fawning respect paid to religious practices is by no means limited to extreme fundamentalist Islam; it has been widely on view as child sexual abuse scandals have racked the Catholic Church. Nearly every commentator takes pains to say something like "We must remember that all priests are not child abusers." Of course they aren't, but that shouldn't keep us from asking the deeper question: What is there in either the practices or the administration of the church that fosters child sexual abuse?

One of the most sickening things to me in the week after of Sept. 11 was the sudden realization that the mosque several blocks from my home was no longer broadcasting the daily calls to prayer. I understood the fear behind that, and hated that my Muslim neighbors felt they must, to some extent, make themselves invisible. And it's to America's credit that a country so prone to violence failed, with scattered barbaric exceptions and the occasional outburst of suspicious stupidity (like the woman whose call to the police resulted in those three medical students being stopped in Florida), to turn on Muslim Americans. Bush's constant imprecations against violence in those weeks must get credit for some of that.

Of course the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists. Of course they are pained and sickened by the denigration of their faith. And of course the desire of radical Islam to stop the clock and disengage from the world is a betrayal of a heritage that Bernard Lewis writes was "for many centuries ... in the forefront of human civilization and achievement." But that still leaves the question of why Islam today leads all other faiths in religiously motivated terrorism.

No one can deny that the reasons for that are complicated. Partly they lie in Islam's lack of separation between religion and community, partly in the religion's roots in a semi-nomadic tribal culture. And much of it is, I think, a modern phenomenon, a response to the overwhelming poverty of the Middle East, some of which can be blamed, in some countries, on the prohibition against women working and the fundamentalist wish to sever ties with the rest of the world.

In such states -- and I realize that this does not describe all Muslim countries -- where there is a booming population of young people who cannot find jobs, the United States is a convenient target, especially when a government wants to deflect criticism from itself. (Those who claim that America wants to keep the Middle East in poverty never address the question of why corporate America would want to cut itself off from a potentially huge market.) Yes, as Thomas Friedman points out, in the 1950s Korea and many Arab states had the same per capita income. The economy of that smaller country now surpasses all Arab economies.

Nevertheless, even to imply a criticism of Islam is to get yourself labeled a Muslim-basher. Martin Amis recently made the perfectly reasonable observation that the way Islam treats women seems to have a lot to do with male insecurity. This was enough to get him called a bigot in London's Evening Standard by that pious high Tory A.N. Wilson, who wrote that only the faithful could make sense out of sacred texts.

It seems clear to me that if we are going to talk honestly about the war on terrorism, which Taslima Nasrin has said is not about East vs. West but about "fundamentalism and secularism, tradition and innovation," we are going to have to be able to talk honestly about religion -- all religion. Think of the rage elicited when a panel of judges ruled (correctly) that the "under God" clause in the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional. Nobody bothered to add that when we're fighting an enemy who seeks to make religious law the only law, those judges were acting patriotically, making a distinction that should and must be made.

Maybe it takes a foreigner to be able to say what Fallaci says here about American culture. To affirm that, for all its stupidity, all of the shameful foreign policy we have indulged in, there has never been a more benevolent superpower than America, that we assimilate more cultures than any other country, that no system besides democracy has ever offered its citizens comparable freedom. It seems ridiculous that in the face of an enemy who has vowed to destroy us, our culture, everything and everyone familiar and loved, that affirming our belief that this is a culture worth preserving is enough to get someone labeled a bigot, an ugly American, a warmonger.

But Fallaci is revivifying and stirring when she claims that we are facing the greatest threat we have faced since fascism and Stalinist communism. However, because we are fighting an enemy who does not, as Lee Harris wrote in Policy Review, proceed from any accepted concept of military strategy but from the grip of religious fantasy, the danger we face may be greater.

So it's dishonest for me to deny that I am moved by Fallaci's call to the barricades. In one passage she promises that, were any of the landmarks of Western culture destroyed, "it is I who would become a holy-warrior. It is I who would become a murderer. So listen to me, you followers of a God who preaches an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I was born in the war. I grew up in the war. About war I know a lot and believe me: I have more balls than your kamikazes who find the courage to die only when dying means killing thousands of people. Babies included. War you wanted, war you want? As far as I am concerned, war is and war will be. Until the last breath."

This is not writing that will last. It will never achieve the reasoned clarity that makes it still possible for us to read Orwell's war commentaries or the dispatches of Ernie Pyle, Edward R. Murrow and A.J. Liebling. But Fallaci has at least recognized that we are now facing a threat no less "opposed to 'every reasonable conception of what life is for, every ambition of the mind or delight of the senses'" than the one those men faced in World War II.

She casts the same gauntlet thrown down by a young man in Washington shortly after the attacks. The New Republic reported that, before the United States had made any military response to Sept. 11, this young man encountered a group protesting U.S. plans to attack Afghanistan and asked them, "Why don't you just kill yourselves?" When a cop upbraided him, he responded, "My brother was killed in New York. And these fuckers ..." Then he stormed off in disgust. This is the question Fallaci puts to those who feel the United States got what was coming to it, or that we cannot justifiably respond to Sept. 11 and other terrorist attacks on our people: She's asking, Do you want to kill yourselves? Suicide, she is saying, is the outcome of a failure to name the threat and to meet it.

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