KEY POINTS:
Writer "attacks Nazism." Not exactly a ball-grabber of a headline, is it? After all, Nazism is a hateful ideology and attacking hateful ideologies is the sort of thing writers tend to do. Apart from anything else, it's easier than writing.
Attacking communism would be just as ho-hum, although there was a time when many people of an artistic or intellectual bent found quite a lot to like about communism.
Ditto socialism and capitalism - they may be compatible with democracy but they're still "-isms" and, like all -isms, not to everyone's taste.
But as several English writers have discovered, attacking Islamism is a different matter.
Last week Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan, author of the recently filmed Atonement, told an Italian newspaper that he despises Islamism which wants to create "a society that I detest".
The Independent interpreted this as "an astonishingly strong attack" and floated the idea that his words might constitute a hate crime.
McEwan made the comments when defending his friend and fellow novelist Martin Amis, who has been accused of racism for saying similar things at somewhat greater length.
We're not talking here about Islam the religion, which has frequently demonstrated its willingness to co-exist with other belief systems; we're talking about Islamism the ideology, which by word and deed has frequently demonstrated the opposite.
Although Islamism is often portrayed as a determination to turn back the clock, theorists such as philosopher John Gray have pointed out it actually has much in common with modern utopian ideologies like communism and fascism.
Like them it offers a one-size-fits-all system that leaves no room for opposition or dissent.
Given that one size never has and never will fit all, in practice such systems can only be implemented and maintained by stealth and/or force.
So why the fuss? It can't be because we're deeply respectful of religion. Christianity in its various forms is attacked and mocked all the time.
That's free speech, and if you don't like it, too bad. We deride Christian fundamentalists for their disbelief in Darwinism, but as yet they haven't advocated the death penalty for espousing the theory of evolution.
Western societies are deeply and justifiably suspicious of religious groups that seek to extend their influence through the political process.
The comic opera political interventions of the Destiny Church and Exclusive Brethren caused much indignation yet clearly these groups are for the most part inner-directed organisations - cults if you will - with a limited appetite for reshaping society in their own image.
Like most other -isms, Islamism has global ambitions and accepts no restraint on its spread and application.
Is it to do with race?
By and large Islamists aren't white and these days racism - at least when practised by whites - is the royal flush of unacceptable behaviour, trumping all else.
Our multicultural ideal depends on the majority embracing diversity even when that encompasses disagreement over fundamental principles.
Surely attacking the ideology of Islamism is no more racist than condemning the crimes and credos of Robert Mugabe or the generals of Myanmar or the Khmer Rouge or Maoism.
And the problem with trying to accommodate Islamism within the multicultural umbrella is that multiculturalism presupposes mutual tolerance.
By viewing all other belief systems as blasphemies whose heretical followers must be converted or eliminated, Islamism rather hangs its hat on intolerance.
Unfortunately the debate over how to respond to Islamism is hopelessly tangled up with the occupation of Iraq, a project conceived in a flush of neoconservative hubris, launched on hazy assumptions and deceit and, until recently anyway, managed with a lethal combination of arrogance and incompetence.
Thus while McEwan, Amis and others have argued that Islamism, with its black and white world view, its medieval censoriousness, its oppression of women and persecution of gays, threatens everything liberals hold dear, their stand has received little support from liberals who tend to see it as right-wing and pro-American.
This has caused particular difficulties for Amis whose father Kingsley, having been a communist as a young man, trekked across the political spectrum to end up a Colonel Blimp figure classifying the outside world into various sub-categories of wog from his leather armchair.
Rather than address his arguments, some of Amis Junior's critics have preferred the cheap shot of suggesting that he's simply re-tracing his father's political odyssey from trendy leftie to unsavoury reactionary.
The disquiet or outright revulsion inspired by George W. Bush's America has created a favourable climate for Islamism, both in terms of recruitment and encouraging the tendency to downplay its incompatibility with Western values.
The Islamists will miss Bush when he retires to his ranch but they'll get over it.
They're in it for the long haul.
