Monk

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I have knocked Dinesh D'Souza on these pages because of his book blaming liberals for the Islamist jihad and for wanting Bush to lose the War on Terror, thinking that the man was a real intellectual lightweight. However, I just watched a debate between him and Christopher Hitchens on the God question, and I must admit that he really showed the great Hitchens up and showed off some real dialectical power, though I still think that D'Souza is rather limited. One could even think that Hitchens showed up tipsy and tried to wing it and get by on his blustery personality, and he ended up coming across as more shrill, allowing the religionist to come across as more reasoned.

Well, even if Hitchens came sober and armed for bear, I dare say the God question will remain to tease our minds for as long as there are men to think.

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Having taken as much notice as we have of the controversy over Dinesh D'Souza and his book, I would feel remiss not to mention this latest critical bomb dropped on D'Souza's head by the conservative Bruce Bawer:

For those who cherish freedom, 9/11 was intensely clarifying. Presumably it, and its aftermath, have been just as clarifying for D’Souza, whose book leaves no doubt whatsoever that he now unequivocally despises freedom—that open homosexuality and female “immodesty” are, in his estimation, so disgusting as to warrant throwing one’s lot in with religious totalitarians. Shortly after The Enemy at Home came out, a blogger recalled that in 2003, commenting in the National Review on the fact that “influential figures” in America’s conservative movement felt “that America has become so decadent that we are ‘slouching towards Gomorrah,’” D’Souza wrote: “If these critics are right, then America should be destroyed.” Well, D’Souza has now made it perfectly clear that he’s one of those critics; and the book he’s written is nothing less than a call for America’s destruction. He is the enemy at home. Treason is the only word for it.

I cannot think of anyone who has sung D'Souza's praises for this book. Even those, such as William Buckley, who have stepped up to defend the man, seem to reject his argument. In our deeply divided country, I find this encouraging. D'Souza's illiberal thesis really is un-American.


(Source: Bruce Bawer for The Stranger)

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Third, why should we think Islamic objections to our culture could justify the violence of the extremists? Jihadists may not like Western drug use, homosexuality, rap music or abortion any more than we do female circumcision, polygamy, sharia law and gender apartheid, which are as common in the Middle East as our purported offenses are in the West. But would anyone thereby justify Americans suicide-bombing Muslim civilians?

-- Victor Davis Hanson at RealClearPolitics.com

This gets my vote for the best and most concise answer to Dinesh D'Souza. Mr. Hanson takes on the whole spectrum of those who have been fond of blaming America for 9/11, from conservatives to liberals, from Christians to secular humanists. I like his diagnosis, too, for this curious phenomenon.

America has enjoyed such a predominant and privileged position that too many Americans expect to see their country realize their greatest ideals, "too many Americans embrace only their fantasy of a perfect United States, rather than the good America we actually have."

( Hanson column )

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The Times has another review on the Dinesh D'Souza book. I thought that it was going to be a countering positive review, perhaps even in sympathetic response to D'Souza's own impassioned self-defense. Instead, I was relieved to see that the book was trashed anew, with D'Souza being put with the Ann Coulter set.

His new book, “The Enemy at Home,” is filled with willfully incendiary — and preposterous — assertions that “the cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11”; that the left is “secretly allied” with the movement that Osama bin Laden and Islamic radicals represent “to undermine the Bush administration and American foreign policy”; and that “the left wants America to be a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill.”

He writes that American prisons at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib “are comparable to the accommodations in midlevel Middle Eastern hotels” in terms of cleanliness, food and amenities, and argues that abuse at Abu Ghraib did not reflect a disregard for human rights, but rather “the sexual immodesty of liberal America.” (“Lynndie England and Charles Graner were two wretched individuals from red America who were trying to act out the fantasies of blue America.”)

... In this shrill, slipshod book, Mr. D’Souza often sounds as if he has a lot in common with those radical Middle Eastern mullahs who are eager to subject daily life to religious strictures and want to curtail individuals’ freedoms and civil liberties.

It’s an interpretation he does not deny: “Yes,” he writes, “I would rather go to a baseball game or have a drink with Michael Moore than with the grand mufti of Egypt. But when it comes to core beliefs, I’d have to confess that I’m closer to the dignified fellow in the long robe and prayer beads than to the slovenly fellow with the baseball cap.”

I imagine that D'Souza was tempted by the fame and money of the Coulter-type of pundit, and he pushed himself further to get in on some of that action. But he has neither Rush Limbaugh's personality nor Ann Coulter's legs. Now he has some work to do to reclaim his scholarly credientials, if he should care to do so.


(Source: Michiko Kakutani for The New York Times)

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After raising a couple of burning critiques of Dinesh D'Souza's latest book, "The Enemy at Home," I suppose it is only fair to mention his aroused response. Apparently, we are afraid of D'Souza because he is onto our left-wing conspiracy to destroy America and blame it on Bush:

When I began writing my new book, this concern [about the left] was largely theoretical, because the left was outside the corridors of power. Now I fear that the extreme cultural left is whispering into the ears of the Democratic Congress. Cut off the funding. Block the increase in troops. Shut down Guantanamo Bay. Lose the war on terrorism -- and blame Bush.

Pointing this out is what makes me dangerous.

D'Souza also defensively points out that he is not another Internet nut-job and partisan hack, since he is a scholar at a right-wing think tank. One of the reasons why I am convinced that he is a partisan hack, who is perhaps slightly more scholarly than Ms. Ann Coulter, is how he leaves out President Reagan when he lists examples of American mishaps that have led Osama bin Laden to believe that we are ripe for atttack.

D'Souza lists President Carter's support for the shah of Iran and President Clinton's arguably passive response to the first World Trade Center bombing. However, in a number of sources, and not just liberal sources, it has been noted as part of the historical record that it was President Reagan's response to the Beirut bombing that killed hundreds of American marines in their barracks that really prompted Osama to think of America as being a "paper tiger." Reagan's response was to immediately withdraw - and I mean IMMEDIATELY and COMPLETELY (rather un-Dubyaesque, as old Reagan was able to learn and change his mind). But D'Souza likes to omit that from the history.

Partisan hack.

( D'Souza column )

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Dinesh D'Souza's "The Enemy at Home" is getting hit hard by the Right and the Left alike. Dean Barnett, who admits loving to make fun of lefties, piles on in tearing apart the book. In particular, I like the way Mr. Barnett deconstructs D'Souza's suggestion that American conservatives and Islamists are as one when it comes to being in antipathy to our liberal culture:

Radical Islam hates a respectable Church-going Presbyterian family man every bit as much as it hates a spoiled libertine like Paris Hilton. As far as radical Islam is concerned, the two are in the same basic class; they’re both infidels. Short of conversion or surrender, there is nothing our society can do to appease radical Islam.

One of the most distressing aspects of our domestic debate the past five years is the way our government and our intellectuals have so thoroughly failed to grasp the tenets of Radical Islam. It is dispiriting to see D’Souza stumble so badly, and distressing to think that he is selling the theories of this book as a de facto spokesman for America’s conservatives.

Yeah, the kind of liberal values that the Islamists abhor are things like voting and women driving. There is not a lot of common ground between mainstream conservatives and Islamists. It might be another matter when it comes to some Christian fundamentalists, but I pray that we are talking about a marginal element in American politics.


(Source: Dean Barnett for Townhall.com)

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Dreadful things happened to America on that day, but, truth be told, D’Souza is not all that upset by them. America is fighting two wars simultaneously, he argues, a war against terror abroad and a culture war at home. We should be using the former, less important, one to fight the latter, really crucial, one. The way to do so is to encourage a split between “radical” Muslims like bin Laden, who engage in jihad, and “traditional” Muslims who are conservative in their political views and deeply devout in their religious practices; understanding the radical Muslims, even being sympathetic to some of their complaints, is the best way to win the support of the traditionalists. We should stand with conservative Muslims in protest against the publication of the Danish cartoons that depicted the Prophet Muhammad rather than rallying to the liberal ideal of free speech. We should drop our alliance with decadent Europe and “should openly ally” with “governments that reflect Muslim interests, not ... Israeli interests.” And, most important of all, conservative religious believers in America should join forces with conservative religious believers in the Islamic world to combat their common enemy: the cultural left.

-- Alan Wolfe for The New York Times

I do not care to lard any particular day with entries on right-wing nuttiness, but they make it hard sometimes. And Mr. Wolfe does some wonderful work laying out this Dinesh D'Souza guy, who seems to favor a Saudi Arabia type of America, albeit without terrorists, except possibly when they are striking out at liberals.

And people wonder how regimes like the Nazis can come to power. Oh, it can happen. You really cannot take anything for granted.

( article )

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