In these pages last Thursday, Tarek Fatah asked me to remove him from the acknowledgments of my book, The Trouble with Islam. Along the way, he called me a "fast-food historian." When detractors spend the time and effort to write such an article, it's usually because they know there's truth in the claims with which they're taking issue. Thank you, Mr. Fatah, for making that subtle point.

Still, I appreciate that Mr. Fatah doesn't want more thanks. And he won't get my gratitude on a related matter: his selectiveness about what I've written -- and corroborated -- about Muslims and Nazis. Mr. Fatah rightly quotes me as saying that the chief Muslim cleric of Jerusalem in the 1930s, Haj Amin al-Husseini, allied himself with the Nazis and "wound up as Hitler's special guest in Berlin, presiding over the unveiling of the Islamic Central Institute in December, 1942." He then accuses me of using that fact to smear the world's 1.2 billion Muslims.

He should have read the very next paragraph in my book, which acknowledges that some Muslims refused to hitch themselves to Hitler -- despite Haj Amin's effort to recruit them. I emphasized that "Bosnian Muslims not only resisted his charms, but actively hid Jews in their homes." Yet we hear nothing about this from Mr. Fatah, the à la carte critic of a fast-food historian.

What we hear, instead, is huffing and puffing over my phrase, "Muslim complicity." I don't retract it. Many Muslims did participate in the Axis war effort, a reality rarely mentioned when we Muslims righteously remind Jews that the Holocaust happened in Christian Europe. Mr. Fatah asks, "Should we talk of Christian complicity in the Holocaust?" Yes, we should.

And there are books that do exactly that. For example: Daniel Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. I look forward to Mr. Fatah's book, The Trouble with Moral Reckoning.

Finally, Mr. Fatah opines that The Trouble with Islam "is not addressed to Muslims; it is aimed at making Muslim-haters feel secure in their thinking."

Who precisely does he mean by "Muslim-haters"? Mr. Fatah recently came clean to me in a TV studio. After the cameras stopped rolling, but in front of the host and crew, he bellowed, "This book was written by the Jews for the Jews!" It's painful to hear such words fly from the mouth of a self-declared Muslim reformer -- an individual who has said that too many Muslims wallow in conspiracy theories.

Indeed, it's because of such honest comments that I included him and his wife in my acknowledgments. Moreover, I did so with their permission.

But in light of Mr. Fatah's finger-pointing at "the Jews" -- a political response to my book rather than an intellectual one -- I do have to reconsider.

In the next edition, my thanks to him might be for revealing just how deep the trouble with Islam is today.

Irshad Manji is host of TVOntario's Big Ideas series and author of The Trouble with Islam: A Wake-Up Call for Honesty and Change.