When I first began reading Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam, his account of the slaughter of filmmaker-provocateur Theo Van Gogh by a young Muslim, I was favorably disposed. Buruma, a native of the Netherlands, had written an incisive account of the cultural contours of Japanese fascism and he had been the co-author of an arguable but nonetheless intriguing book on anti-West hatred entitled Occidentalism. But in Murder in Amsterdam Buruma, went out of his way to find irrational zealotry in the proponents of the Enlightenment like Ayan Hirsi Ali, who has since fled the Netherlands, and social virtues in the adherents of Islamic fundamentalism.

It was a truly perverse performance by Buruma, culminating in his argument that sympathetic understanding for Islamic fundamentalism was the best chance to curb future murders like that of Van Gogh. Like the bureaucrats of the European Union, who are more concerned with using the Islamic world as a counter weight to the US than with internal threats to their liberties, Buruma was an anti-anti-Islamist.

Now Buruma has been taken to task by the well-regarded French writer Pascal Bruckner, who has dissected Buruma’s rhetorical game of moral equivalence, calling it out as one which “those who revolt against barbarism are themselves accused of being barbarians.” It’s redolent of the old Cold War liberal rhetorical gambit in which anti-communists were condemned as merely another variety of ideologue by anti-anti-communists.

“Criticism of prejudices,” notes an angry Bruckner, is taken by the likes of Buruma as “nothing but a prejudice itself, proving that humanity is incapable of self-reflection.” Bruckner sees the ugliness underneath Buruma’s back door arguments for multiculturalism. “The paradox of multiculturalism,” that escapes a self-described liberal like Buruma is that, “it accords the same treatment to all communities, but not to the people who form them, denying them the freedom to liberate themselves from their own traditions.” In effect, it gives official sanction to the group's oppression of the individual. Europe’s Muslims, explains Bruckner, are by means of multiculturalism “refused what has always been our privilege: passing from one world to another, from tradition to modernity, from blind obedience to rational decision making.“

This is no small matter in Amsterdam and Holland, where there has been a sharp increase in out migration by the skilled middle class even as the demography leads inexorably to Muslim majorities in urban areas. The best chance for a moderate Islam, argues Bruckner, is to strongly affirm the best of Enlightenment traditions so that Europe’s Muslims are given a choice about how they want to live.

Not surprisingly, Bruckner’s criticism has sent Buruma into a snit. The problem, says Burma in his reply, is that people like Bruckner attribute to Islam intolerance that can be best ascribed to tribal cultures. “Condemning Islam, without taking the many variations into account, is too indiscriminate. Not every Muslim, not even every orthodox Muslim, is a holy warrior…. Isolating the jihadis and fighting their dangerous dogmas is too important to be dealt with by crude polemics.” Buruma protests that “I admire Ayan Hirsi Ali, and agree with most of what she stands for. Liberal democracy must be defended against violent extremism, and women should be protected from abuse.”

The problem here is that Buruma seems to have missed the point of his own book. His proposal to offer comfort and understanding to fundamentalists as a prophylactic for Jihadism, and even leaving its implausibility aside, it can’t be squared with his formalistic declarations in favor of freedom and the rights of women. Job Cohen, mayor of Amsterdam and fellow, albeit less veiled, multi-culturalist, understands the logic of Buruma’s argument perfectly. He insists that "the conscious discrimination against women by certain groups of orthodox Muslims" needs to be accepted because Amsterdam needs a "new glue" to "hold society together"—or more likely tear it apart.