None (but Me) Dare Call It Treason

By ALAN WOLFE
New York Times

THE ENEMY AT HOME
The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.

By Dinesh D’Souza.

333 pp. Doubleday. $26.95.

At first Dinesh D’Souza considered him “a dark-eyed fanatic, a gun-toting extremist, a monster who laughs at the deaths of 3,000 innocent civilians.” But once he learned how Osama bin Laden was viewed in the Muslim world, D’Souza changed his mind. Now he finds bin Laden to be “a quiet, well-mannered, thoughtful, eloquent and deeply religious person.” Despite being considered a friend of the Palestinians, he “has not launched a single attack against Israel.” We denounce him as a terrorist, but he uses “a different compass to assess America than Americans use to assess him.” Bin Laden killed only 3,000 of us, with “every victim counted, every death mourned, every victim’s family generously compensated.” But look what we did in return: many thousands of Muslims dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, “and few Americans seem distressed over these numbers.”

I never thought a book by D’Souza, the aging enfant terrible of American conservatism, would, like the Stalinist apologetics of the popular front period, contain such a soft spot for radical evil. But in “The Enemy at Home,” D’Souza’s cultural relativism hardly stops with bin Laden. He finds Ayatollah Khomeini still to be “highly regarded for his modest demeanor, frugal lifestyle and soft-spoken manner.” Islamic punishment tends to be harsh — flogging adulterers and that sort of thing — but this, D’Souza says “with only a hint of irony,” simply puts Muslims “in the Old Testament tradition.” Polygamy exists under Islamic law, but the sexual freedom produced by feminism in this country is, at least for men, “even better than polygamy.” And the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statement that the West has a taboo against questioning the existence of the Holocaust, while “pooh-poohed by Western commentators,” was “undoubtedly accurate.” Unlike President Bush, who once said he could not understand how anyone could hate America, D’Souza knows why Islamic radicals attack us. “Painful though it may be to admit,” he admits, “some of what the critics or even enemies say about America and the West ... may be true.” Susan Sontag never said we brought Sept. 11 on ourselves. Dinesh D’Souza does say it.

(Continued
here.)

Here is the Washington Post's review of the book:

Incendiary
In an angry polemic, Dinesh D'Souza blames American liberals for the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Reviewed by Warren Bass
Sunday, January 14, 2007; BW05

THE ENEMY AT HOME

The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11

By Dinesh D'Souza

Doubleday. 333 pp. $26.95

On Sept. 13, 2001, the television evangelist Jerry Falwell offered a stunned, grieving nation a startling diagnosis of al-Qaeda's motivations. "I really believe," he said on Pat Robertson's show, "The 700 Club," "that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' "

At the time, Falwell's analysis was roundly denounced as hysterical and elicited a pointed disavowal from President Bush. But Dinesh D'Souza, a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, has decided, essentially, that Falwell was on to something. The Enemy at Home calls America's culture war synonymous with its war on terrorism and flatly blames the country's left for 9/11. But unlike Falwell and Robertson's outburst at a moment of crisis, D'Souza's is offered in a spirit of cool reflection. The result is the worst nonfiction book about terrorism published by a major house since 9/11, but with the country still facing a serious jihadist threat, it's worth trying to understand D'Souza's own exercise in finger-pointing.

Here's the main argument, such as it is. Why has al-Qaeda targeted America? "Not because of U.S. troops in Mecca," D'Souza writes. "Not even because of Israel. . . . The suicide bombers of radical Islam are not blowing themselves up because they are distressed over the Gulf War of 1991 or because they are in solidarity with the Palestinians." Rather, "what bin Laden objected to was America staying in the Middle East, importing with it the immoral ingredients of American values and culture." That makes the left "responsible for 9/11" because it "has fostered a decadent American culture that angers and repulses traditional societies" and has waged "an aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family and to promote secular values in non-Western cultures." In sum, "the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world."

(The rest is here.)