Dinesh D'Souza certainly knows how to sell books... A few years ago, when I was between jobs, I almost got a job working for him as a research assistant at AEI. I wasn't hired, and a short time later he left AEI for the Hoover Institution. I don't know him that well, but he's a bright guy and a persuasive writer--which might be why his new book has gotten everyone into such a snit. I was struck by his comment to me that he came to America to study, rather than Britain, because as an Indian he felt that British racism and historical colonialist attitudes would never permit him to be recognized as British, while America offered an opportunity to become accepted as an American in his adopted country. For those who accuse D'Souza of anti-Americanism, I can only answer, "he voted with his feet."
However, his analysis appears to be both provocative in its stress on the importance of culture, while simultaneously pointing out an apparent marriage of convenience between the American left and Osama Bin Laden. Where he errs, I believe, is in his view that a conservative, Christian America would be any less offensive to Dar-al-Islam than a liberal, Secular America. As Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, there can be no compromise with Islamist extremists, it doesn't matter what Americans do, the enemy must be decisively defeated--their goal is our destruction.
Nevertheless, the debate he has sparked may prove interesting.
In The Enemy at Home D'Souza arguest that America's cultural left is responsible for the attacks of 9/11. Here's an excerpt from the introduction on his website:
Thus we have the first way in which the cultural left is responsible for 9/11. The left has produced a moral shift in American society that has resulted in a deluge of gross depravity and immorality. This deluge threatens to engulf our society and is imposing itself on the rest of the world. The Islamic radicals are now convinced that America represents the revival of pagan barbarism in the world, and 9/11 represents their ongoing battle with what they perceive to be the forces of Satan.I may not personally agree with everything Dinesh has to say, but I'll defend his right to say it. He deserves a high-minded point-by-point response from his opponents, rather than the crude attacks that have been levelled at him. If you want to decide for yourself, you can buy the book from Amazon.com here:
I have focused so far on American cultural depravity and its global impact. But there is a second way in which the cultural left has helped to produce 9/11. In the domain of foreign policy, the left has helped to produce the conditions that led to the destruction of the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. First, under Jimmy Carter, the liberals helped to get rid of the Shah of Iran and thus install the Khomeini regime in Iran. The pretext was the Shah’s human rights failings, but the result was the abdication of the Shah and the triumph of Khomeini. The Khomeini revolution, which has proved the viability of Islamic theocracy in the modern age, was the match that has lit the conflagration of radicalism and fundamentalism throughout the Muslim world. It is Khomeini’s success that paved the road to 9/11.
During the Clinton administration, liberal foreign policy conveyed to Bin Laden and his co-conspirators a strong impression of American vacillation, weakness, and even cowardice. When Al Qaeda attacked and killed a handful of Marines in Mogadishu in 1993, the Clinton administration withdrew American troops from that country. When Al Qaeda orchestrated the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, President Clinton responded with a handful of desultory counterstrikes that did little harm to Al Qaeda. These American actions, Bin Laden has confessed, emboldened him to strike directly at America on September 11, 2001.
Now that America is fighting back, seeking to uproot the terrorists and transform the political landscape in the Middle East, the left is fighting hard to prevent that campaign from succeeding. It does so not simply by resisting at every stage whatever actions are proposed and implemented to win the war, but, just as importantly, it unceasingly fuels the hatred of American foreign policy among Muslims. It is a common belief among Muslims, for example, that the main reason America consistently sides with Israel is that Americans hate Muslims. A Muslim lawyer I interviewed in Tunis puts the matter this way. “I keep hearing,” he says, “that countries base their foreign policy on self-interest. The self-interest of America is in obtaining access to oil, and we are the ones who have all the oil. The Israelis don’t have any oil. So why is America always on the side of Israel and against the Muslims? Please don’t tell me it’s because Israel is America’s only friend in the Middle East. After all, Israel is one of the main reasons why so many Muslims are America’s enemy. So I am forced to conclude that there is only one reason why America acts against it self-interest and backs Israel against the Muslims. The reason is that Americans hate Arabs. America is violently opposed to Islam. So the Christians are making allies with the Jews to get rid of Islam.”
This is a relatively articulate expression of one of the central themes of fundamentalist propaganda. This is the argument that America is a bigoted nation that wants to take over Muslim countries and steal their oil. In reality this claim is absurd. Americans do not hate Muslims, and America does not want to occupy the Muslim world or seize its natural resources. America supports Israel for complex reasons of history, common ideology, and the domestic political influence of Jewish Americans. So this Islamic perception of American foreign policy is utterly wrong. But it is routinely confirmed by the American left. The writings of leading leftists affirm that yes, America is a racist power that wants to conquer and plunder non-Western peoples. Anne Norton writes that anti-Muslim bigotry is now “the unacknowledged cornerstone of American foreign policy.”[xxxiii] Legal scholar Mari Matsuda insists that “the history of hating Arabs as a race runs strong in the United States” where Arabs are “reviled even more than blacks.”[xxxiv] Rashid Khalidi contends that America’s actions are based on “wildly inaccurate and often racist stereotypes about Arabs, Islam, and the Middle East.”[xxxv] Writing in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, Edward Said claims that “for decades in America there has been a cultural war against the Arabs and Islam” and that Americas Middle East policy is based on blind hatred for stereotypical “sheikhs and camel jockeys.”[xxxvi] By confirming Muslims in their worst prejudices, the American left has strengthened their conviction that America is evil and deserves to be destroyed.
To repeat—because this a point on which I do not wish to be misunderstood—I am in no sense suggesting that the left is disloyal to America. To say this is to confuse the success of the Bush administration, or even of American foreign policy, with the interest of the country as a whole. As we saw earlier with Senator Byrd, the left has its own view of what’s good for America, and it is fiercely loyal to that ideal. So disloyalty is not the issue. The issue is why the left is so passive, reluctant, and even oppositional in its stance in the American war on terrorism. My answer is that the cultural left opposes the war against the radical Muslims because it wants them to succeed in defeating President Bush in particular and American foreign policy in general. Far from seeking to destroy the movement that Bin Laden and the Islamic radicals represent, the amazing fact is that the American left is secretly allied with that movement to undermine the Bush administration and American foreign policy. The left would like nothing better than to see America in general, and President Bush in particular, forced out of Iraq. Although such an outcome would plunge Iraq into further chaos and represent a catastrophic loss for American foreign policy, it would represent a huge win for the cultural left, in fact the left’s greatest foreign policy victory since the Vietnam War.
The notion that the American left seeks victory for Islamic radicals in Iraq may at first glance seem implausible. One person who does not think so, however, is Bin Laden. In his October 30, 2004 videotaped message, apparently timed to precede the presidential election, Bin Laden drew liberally from themes in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 to condemn the Bush administration. Bin Laden denounced Bush for election-rigging in Florida, for going to war to enrich oil companies and defense contracts like Halliburton, for curtailing civil liberties under the Patriot Act, and for reading stories to school-children while the World Trade Center burned.[xxxvii] Apart from the rhetorical flourishes of “Praise be to Allah,” Bin Laden sounds exactly like Michael Moore. And why not? In opposing President Bush and American foreign policy, they are both on the same side.