Dinesh DSouza is The Enemy at Home

Dinesh D'Souza is The Enemy at Home
By Bondo
The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 By Dinesh D'Souza

Many reviewers, liberal and conservative, have exposed the deplorable thesis of Dinesh D'Souza's tract?that the cultural left is responsible for causing terrorism?and I won't bother to repeat them. Rather, I want to delve into the core of his book, and present D'Souza in his own words. Aware that his premise is thin, D'Souza tries to hit liberals on both sides, attacking both the cultural left and the foreign policy left, and this bifurcated thesis is the beginning of his undoing. He presents arguments?such as they are?to condemn the foreign policy leftists, but some of those same arguments exonerate the cultural leftists, and vice versa. He ignores this contradiction; apparently hoping nobody notices his shoddy scholarship. To be sure, he gets credit for recognizing the sometimes overlooked cultural chasm separating the West and fundamentalist Muslims; many leftists misguidedly claim we should tolerate these perspectives. D'Souza, however, goes a step further and advocates an alliance between domestic social conservatives and Radical Islam. As a result, The Enemy at Home is not only intellectually weightless, it is bereft of conscience. He takes his sources and evidence out of context and twists them into nonsense arguments chosen not for their plausibility but because they can be used to bash liberals. And he is less interested in a legitimate scholarly pursuit and more interested in fostering the notion of an unnamed "Christian Nation," an authoritarian social conservatism, to a receptive audience.

Uncle Osama Wants You
From the outset, Dinesh lays the groundwork for an alliance between social conservatives and Islamic fundamentalists. "Conservatives," he explains, "are in the best position to understand why traditional cultures fear and hate America? because conservatives share many of the moral concerns of traditional people." He tries to maintain the fiction that he is appealing to "traditional" Muslims and not "radicals" or terrorists; but the fa?ade collapses immediately. He writes:

In fact, as our own domestic and cultural debate shows, we know that many of the concerns raised by the radical Muslims are widely shared in our own society. Many conservative and religious Americans agree with the Islamic fundamentalists that American culture has become increasingly vulgar, trivial, and disgusting."

In those two sentences D'Souza plants himself?and all social conservatism?firmly on the side of the terrorists. It is not surprising then, that many conservatives have problems with D'Souza's treatise. Although he says he wants to ally with what he calls "traditional" Muslims, he admits both that there is no real difference between traditional and radical Muslims, or between the goals of Republican social conservatives and the radicalized Muslims. Dinesh is correct to claim that the Terrorists, Islamofascists, Islamic radicals, traditionalists, or whatever else you want to call them, have a cultural problem with America. At this point, it is undeniable. However, D'Souza goes the appalling extra mile and sides with the terrorists and their sympathizers. D'Souza's delusion is that he thinks he can compromise with them.

Who then, are his potential allies? Prominent radical Sayyed Qutb, who spent time observing "decadent" Americans, noted that, "one should accept shari'a and reject all other laws. There is no other meaning of Islam." Before we can digest this, Dinesh states, "this may seem like a radical view, but its shared by many traditional Muslims." Once again, these are the people Dinesh wants to ally with. Aware that this may discomfit readers that are not fundamentalist Muslims, he tries to soften the blow. He insists on a ludicrous semantic argument over the definition of theocracy, declaring that Shari'a can't possibly be theocracy because the priests are not literally in control, since God's law ultimately controls the priest. To D'souza that seems like a major point. To most others it is a distinction without a difference.

And what of them? He attacks liberals for exporting their values, but virtually ignores the many cultural and moral relativists who want to leave native societies alone. He does, however, inexplicably attack those relativists for being relativists. D'Souza criticizes Edward Said for saying that, "for decades in America there has been a cultural war against the Arabs and Islam" without recognizing that Said is partly in sympathy with his own argument. D'Souza warns about the dangers of European ethnocentrism so often that he ends up infatuated with Islamocentrism. At one point he asks, "are they right?" This question is beyond rhetorical, as he answered it himself a hundred pages earlier, when he states that Muslims "feel this new morality will destroy their religion and their way of life?and they are quite right!" While liberals, for their part, look at Islamic society and, "clearly [do] not approve of the way of life in Muslim countries, particularly those under the sway of Islamic fundamentalism. Those cultures are viewed by many western liberals as backward, hierarchical, patriarchal, and deeply oppressive." The fact that they are hierarchical, patriarchal, and deeply oppressive doesn't concern D'Souza and it doesn't intrude on his analysis.

Freedom As Contagion?
Dinesh teeters on the edge of total lunacy throughout the book, and he falls off the wagon when talking about liberals. He launches a tirade against Hillary Clinton's support of the V-Chip, because she supposedly doesn't support an "S-Chip" to block out sexual imagery. "Thus," D'Souza claims, "Clinton tacitly conveys her indifference to the goal of protecting childhood sexual innocence." It doesn't occur to D'Souza to investigate whether the "viewer control" chip filters all inappropriate content. Undeterred, D'Souza asks, "When is the last time someone on the left scorned the music industry in the same way that liberals scorn Tyco and Enron?" One wonders whom D'Souza is trying to convince with these bizarre attacks. The severity of the crime doesn't matter. Dinesh doesn't even care if there is a crime. All that matters is he is upset about it, and he wants other people to be offended with him. Stealing hundreds of millions of dollars and robbing people of their savings is of no consequence to D'Souza when some other people produce and sell music. Yet he presses on, asking, "Why don't liberals treat movie companies with the same belligerence that they treat the cigarette companies?" Like many conservative Christians, Dinesh is interested in purifying the cancer within American society. It is a theme he returns to again and again.

D'Souza notes that Muslims are worried about the "social and moral corruption produced by the virus of Westernization." To this end, he attacks Americans, liberal and conservative, for suppressing religious education in madrassas, which he calls the "systematic secularization of Muslim society." These schools are accused of incubating open hatred of Israelis and Americans alike. But, as we have seen, D'Souza thinks much of this hatred is justified and even sympathizes with it. He notes that, "one can hardly blame Muslims for chafing under such extreme measures to transform their national and religious identity" and declares, "mosques have generally served as bulwark against tyranny." Of course, he is exempting the mosques from the tyranny they actually impose. Dinesh quotes Muslim critics charging that, in western cultures, "underage girls know what married women do and more." He makes his point, moves on, and only later acknowledges underage marriages in traditional Islamic cultures when it is more convenient for him. That doesn't stop D'Souza from addressing his conservative readers, imploring, "Why should the right stand up for the left's debased values. Why should our people defend their America?" He notes that bin Laden attempts to divide Americans against each other in some of his videotapes, but he doesn't realize that he's doing the terrorists' work for them, politically and culturally.

Reiterating the same basic point, he says that, for Muslims, "Western culture [is] a kind of malady for which there is no antidote or cure." D'Souza sets his sights on Abu Ghraib scandal and Islamic reactions to it. In his estimation, the Abu Ghraib soldiers were "individuals from red America who were trying to act of the fantasies of blue America." There is little evidence of this, let alone evidence that the values of red America are really that different from blue America. He continues his indictment, concluding that "If [the soldiers] were artists staging these pictures in a loft in Soho they could have been hailed as pioneers? but being low-life Appalachians, Graner and England inspired none of these elevated thoughts." Dinesh thus idiotically slams liberals for being elitists?elitists who hate outsider art no less!?even while he ignores the fact that the prisoners were, in fact, prisoners, and had this done to them against their will. Conservatives almost always overlook this coerced, this forced aspect to Abu Ghraib, just as D'Souza ignores it. How many Soho artists abduct their subjects off the streets, hold them in captivity, and then force them into humiliating sexual poses? Not many, I'd expect. Dinesh is so driven to blame liberals, that he is willing to blame them for anything. He could just as easily have accused Graner and England of trying to recapture the great red state tradition of antebellum slavery.

At one point, D'Souza seemingly applauds the West, writing that Americans are "more varied, spirited, and individualistic than in previous generations" and that there is an "Infectious spirit of freedom that Americans and non-Americans find irresistible." This is an odd moment for an author that spends most of his time attacking our freedom and our individuality. Dinesh doesn't understand and never acknowledges that our spiritedness and individuality is inexorably linked to our freedom from oppressive and limiting fundamentalist dogma. The free society wherein people are unshackled and free to live their own lives and make their own choices is a vibrant society. By calling for an imposition on that freedom, D'Souza would rob us of our greatest strength. He scorns variation and favors banning books, insisting, "literary culture would not suffer greatly if any of [D.H. Lawrence's] books had been suppressed." Dinesh may not think much of Lawrence, but he holds The Great Gatsby in high regard, calling it "American culture at its finest." A group of Muslim readers is not impressed however, because the novel does not sufficiently condemn adultery. They are pleased that the wrath of God eventually catches up with Gatsby, so its not a total loss. D;Souza looks at the Danish cartoon controversy, charging, "For traditional Muslims, free speech was not the issue. The newspaper may have a right to publish the cartoons, but it should not have exercised that right." This is preposterous. The whole point was that the publishers didn't have "the right to blaspheme." The only thing infectious about Dinesh's worldview is its capacity for repression. He never considers that we have an infectious spirit of freedom because we actually have freedom and value our individuality. That freedom threatens not only the values of, but also the very existence of hierarchical, patriarchal, and deeply oppressive traditional societies. These regimes are built on a foundation of coercion and condemnation. If their people are ever given the freedom to live their own lives, the repressive regimes, the need to control every aspect of their lives would no longer exist.

Dinesh says that liberals believe the "central premise of the war on terror is a clash of fundamentalisms. Liberals typically define the conflict as between Christian fundamentalists and Islamic fundamentalism" this is, typically, hogwash. About the only people who believe that are Christian fundamentalists themselves. Few, if any liberals go around parading Islam as an intractable enemy of Christ's truth. Instead, the sentiment is common among Christian leaders; in the military, the conservative minded General Boykin even says he looks at the enemy and sees Satan. What many secularists do affirm is that Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism are two sides of the same coin. Dinesh writes that Muslims hate us because, "the public life of America?it's government, laws, and policies?is intentionally divorced from Religion." Coincidently, that's the exact same problem the religious right, Dinesh included, has with America. Dinesh himself proposes an alliance between the two fundamentalisms because they have so much in common.

First They Came For?
D'Souza is so invested in not offending Islamic religious sensibilities that he loses all sight of morality even as he claims to be defending it. In order to stop offending Muslims, and thus stop inspiring terrorism, Dinesh is asking us to stay silent in the face of gross inhumanity. This is akin to demanding that Kennedy and Reagan stop criticizing immoral and inhumane acts of the Soviet Union. The natural and only consequence of Dinesh's policy is that the terrorists and their sympathizers would be free to commit any number of atrocities in any number of repressive states. D'Souza discusses the killing of Theo van Gogh, and he gladly describes van Gogh as a sexually promiscuous cocaine user who compared Muslims to "goat fuckers." But while D'Souza attacks a murdered man, never once does he say that killing him was, in fact, wrong. Dinesh assaults murdered Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn and says Fortuyn's values were legalized drugs, porn, and homosexuality. Again, never once does D'Souza deign to say it was wrong to murder him.

At this point the reader begs D'Souza to say murder is wrong, but he presses on. In Afghanistan, Abdul Rahman converted from Islam to Christianity. The Post-Taliban government tried to murder him, and was under intense public pressure to do so. Rahman was granted asylum in Italy when his case aroused strong international condemnation. Dinesh explains Rahman away by saying that in Islam, apostasy is tantamount to treason. Not willing to stop there, Dinesh defends the fatwa against Salman Rushdie?a hero and to left and right alike?as justified. The fatwa, he writes, "'was entirely in line with Islamic teaching,' and even traditional Muslims could not disagree with the Ayatollah's verdict." I don't want to belabor the point, but these "traditional Muslims" are the same people Dinesh wants to ally with. D'Souza's laconic attitude to the faith based threats to Rushdie's life can perhaps be explained by Rushdie's own choice of targets. Rushdie not only attacks Islamic fundamentalism, he also takes aim at Christian Fundamentalism, a subject nearer and dearer to D'Souza's heart. He blasts Rushdie for saying, "the religious fundamentalism of the U.S. is as alarming as anything in the much feared world of Islam." Yet Rushdie's charge is certainly reasonable and at home in a text that proves him right. Many others expressing similar sentiments are on the receiving end of D'Souza's scorn.

At various points, Dinesh attacks Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other NGOs for advocating against such atrocities and defending the accused. The overarching message is that if religious authorities advocate murder it is fine with D'Souza. He mocks the thought of intervention in Darfur, and he effectively excludes Americans or their governments from speaking out against human rights abuses. We can't criticize murders and executions because it angers the people doing the murdering. We should instead turn a blind eye to these repressive regimes to lessen the chance of a terror attack against ourselves.

Throughout the book D'Souza protests that he personally opposes some of the things Muslims criticize?D'Souza says he's anti-sodomy laws and pleased with increased social tolerance of homosexuals, for instance?but this is a smokescreen to reassure Western readers that he is not a complete monster, and also to rhetorically lessen the brutality of the Islamic punishments. In fact, D'Souza's remarks are meaningless. Similarly, he acknowledges that "gross abuse" is "the natural consequence of a worldview that places the entire orbit of life under religious scrutiny and possible state regulation" but doesn't offer any remedy. D'Souza's fundamentalist philosophy thus reaches a dead end. Dinesh doesn't speak for Muslims, and he certainly can't advocate his beliefs in Muslim countries otherwise he's committing the same ethnocentric aggression he accuses the left of perpetuating. D'Souza's prescriptive repression cannot cure itself.

Cairo and Jerusalem
D'Souza notes that some Islamofascists once thought that the "Road to Jerusalem goes through Cairo," meaning, of course, that Jerusalem will never be conquered unless they can achieve power and impose a strict Islamic society in traditionally Muslim lands. After years of failure, D'Souza states, Bin Laden decided that the road actually passed through New York, and began plotting 9/11. D'Souza uses this to attack a weak or "defeatist" liberal foreign policy, oblivious to the fact that he is willing to cede Cairo, Baghdad, and every other power center to Islamic extremists, thus opening the road to Jerusalem himself.

He strenuously advocates democracy in Muslim lands, a democracy that will ultimately adopt socially conservative Islamic law. He says that the terrorists will hate this, because these will be "pro-American" democracies. But he gives no evidence of this, and throughout most of the book, "pro-American" means secular. In fact, he makes a convincing case that the terrorists/radicals and traditionalist Muslims favor democracy because they will win at the ballot box. Moderate Muslims are outnumbered (D'Souza even lampoons them, and saying there are only eight of them) and have the most to loose. D'Souza, then, will give the terrorists everything they want. The free society becomes a casualty. This doesn't give D'Souza pause, since he derides the notion of liberal morality based on human conscience and opposes the free society built on self-determination. D'Souza, American social conservatives, and the Islamic traditionalists/radicals all want to impose an ordered society based on traditional morality-- a rigid and forever unalterable standard of right and wrong.

Dinesh devotes an enormous amount of space declaring that the terrorists and traditionalists fear Western culture and secularization more than anything else. They want to control people's lives, and we are told they believe that, "for a society to forgo divine rules? is the very definition of atheism." America surely looks like a carnal battlefield in comparison, and D'Souza petulantly asks, "Where are standards? There are none, just as Muslims allege." Muslims want the freedom to stone adulterers, and D'Souza will give it to them. It would be too ethnocentric to judge. Besides, it gets results. One man claims that the deterrent effect of stoning just two people stopped all adultery in Kandahar.

The overarching theme is that American force cannot deter Islamic Extremists; American torture does not shake their resolve. Death does not frighten them, only dishonor and the loss of their patriarchy. Bin Laden calls America the Great Satan, and Dinesh convinces his audience that atheists are the real Great Satan. He asserts that only atheism "explains why people will fly planes into buildings. Only when people perceive their deepest beliefs to be under attack are they willing to take extreme measures." This is not entirely true, since it doesn't explain anti-Israeli suicide attacks, but it doesn't concern D'Souza. In his zeal to bash his culture war opponents, he validates the concerns of his foreign policy opponents.

D'Souza incriminates himself mere pages later when he discusses the beliefs of Radical Sheik Yusef Qaradawi, explaining, "Even the hostility of Muslims to Israel, Qaradawi says, is 'not about matters of faith' but entirely because 'they seized our land.'" Dinesh uses that to bash his aforementioned spurious contention that liberals believe that the war on Terror is a battle between Christians and Muslims, going so far to triumphantly proclaim, "Thus the liberal doctrine? of two opposed forms of religious fundamentalism is false." To D'Souza then, only atheism inspires terror attacks. Except when land inspires those attacks. When it is convenient, D'Souza claims that cultural modernists cause the war on terror by antagonizing traditional societies. When it's safe, he blames imperial ambitions and military actions. He evidently hopes his audience will be too stupid to detect the elaborate, if transparent, shell game. The only thing that matters is convincing gullible readers that the left is always wrong. Cultural liberals cause terrorism, and leftist complaints against U.S. Foreign policy are wrong. Dinesh delves once more into the ridiculous rebutting this last point, declaring that Muslims can't be mad at America's military ambitions and invasions because the Mongols were worse.

Will The Real Great Satan Please Stand Up?
From this precarious position, D'Souza details his theory of the war on Terror. The Mongol hordes may be worse than America, but someone else is more terrible and more feared than both of them combined. That man is President Bush The Iraq war, you see, is really a scattershot exercise in indiscriminate violence. Bush evidently doesn't care who gets killed where, as long as bodies turn up at the morgue, or more likely, get dumped in the street. D'Souza explains:

Remember the old Western movies where John Wayne is called into town as the new sheriff to apprehend a bunch of cattle-stealers? He goes into the bar, where the bad guys are shouting and jeering at him. He doesn't know who the culprits are, but he finds a couple of obstreperous hoodlums and slams their heads together, or pistol-whips them, and then he walks out of the bar. The message is that there is a new sheriff in town. After 9/11, I believe, the Bush administration wanted to convey this message to the Islamic radicals. In Saddam Hussein, Bush located an especially egregious hoodlum who would become the demonstration project for America's seriousness and resolve.

It is as good an explanation as any, but D'Souza undercuts himself horribly when he later attacks "European Anti-Americanism" which he defines as "Bush the mad cowboy, Bush the Christian fundamentalist" and that these stereotypes are "largely based on hostility to American conservativism." He just compared Bush to a mad cowboy. The irony is lost on him. Further, what's amazing is that D'Souza thinks he has the credibility to condemn liberal (and by extension, European) attacks on Bush's war on terror after admitting that he thinks Bush arbitrarily lashes out at anyone within reach. And Dinesh thinks it is a muscular, admirable sign of strength. Such a policy is not admirable; it is a reckless and irresponsible use of our global power. Liberals and leftists of all stripes are well within their rights to condemn such an aimless act of foreign aggression. As with the rest of his book, Dinesh doesn't see the inherent contradictions.

In a final twist, D'Souza revisits the Great Satan. D'Souza spent the entire book explaining that cultural liberals?atheists, secularists, frankly, this means ordinary Western men and women?were the Great Satan that caused terror attacks attracted terrorist scorn. Inexplicably, Dinesh turns around and says that President Bush and his cavalier, cutthroat military adventurism makes him the Great Satan. At this point, you really can't be blamed for objecting that Bush is not an atheist. Eagle eyed readers will also note that Bush is also an American, and that maybe, just maybe, that means that the Mongols might be less feared than the Americans all along. D'Souza cannot make up his mind what he wants to do, so instead he flails his arms around like President Bush, aiming his barbs at liberal, atheist windmills.

D'Souza is a desperate man. He wants America to embrace an authoritarian social conservativism, and he recognizes that he is in danger of being pushed to the fringe. In the US, social conservatism still sees successes, although they are losing the culture war at home, and Bush's conception of the war on terror is faltering. In Europe, the Pope complains that Catholicism should not be seen as a "church of no's" and the culture war is all but irrevocably lost. Instead of moderating, D'Souza demands that liberals reject the left and "consign it to the margins of political respectability where it came from, and where it always belonged" even as he advocates an alliance with Islamic radicalism. To this end, he inoculates his potential allies against all criticism. Whether he wants to admit it or not, D'Souza wants to strangle the Western world's ability to criticize human rights abuses. D'Souza (and bin Laden) complain that secularization is being imposed on the Islamic world, but in practice this simply means that the Mullahs can't kill whomever they want. Offering Rahman and Rushdie asylum undoubtedly offended Muslims; we let these betrayers of the faith escape "justice." If D'Souza is to be believed, these acts of compassion?these interferences in their culture?undoubtedly launched a thousand terrorists against us. And he asks us to be silent Liberals (or sensible conservatives, for that matter) who raise their voices up in condemnation of oppression and atrocities risk inciting terrorist reprisals against our own cities. And what of our historical allies? "Let Europe be alienated," D'Souza implores, "Conservatives gain nothing by courting people who do not share their basic values, either on foreign policy or on social issues." Decadent Europe presumably becomes ground zero for all future Islamic attacks. Dinesh expresses no regret for that either.

Near the beginning of the book, he has the gall to state, "In placing the cultural left and the Islamic fundamentalists on the same side, I am not trying to score a partisan or even an ideological point." Dinesh lives up to his word, but only if you discount the next 270 pages in which he scores partisan and ideological points. "The Left Wing view can be summed up this way," D'Souza writes, "They are justifiably furious at us because we are the bad guys." Conveniently enough, that is also D'Souza's view. In this sense, The Enemy At Home is self-incriminating. He rails at liberals and atheists to distract from his own alliance with Islamofascism and his argument collapses under the weight of its internal contradictions and its own dementia. The book is so full of idiocy that any right wing audience he was aiming for might be best described as what D'Souza himself terms "outside public opinion." But the true beneficiaries of the book will be religious moderates and the godless heathens D'Souza criticizes. They will see a conservative scholar in the role of the snitch admitting what they have long held true. They will see confirmation that they are right, and thus they will see confirmation of their worst fears. We are not left wondering whether Christian and Islamic fundamentalism share the same goals. Dinesh proves it. We are left with the knowledge that D'Souza himself is the enemy at home. He is a danger to America, he is a danger to liberals and conservatives alike, and in all probability he is a danger to himself. He his oblivious to his book's flaws and he reacts indignantly towards those that point it out. He has not so much written a book as constructed a dilapidated house of cards.