The New Appeasement.
Over at Slate, Tim Noah dissects a publicity page for the new book by conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza. The book is called The Enemy at Home, and from the publisher’s description may well be the most asinine attempt to politicize September 11 to date — quite an accomplishment in post-Coulter America.
D’Souza’s argument is…aw hell. If I paraphrase it, you wouldn’t believe it. Here’s the description:
In THE ENEMY AT HOME, bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza makes the startling claim that the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts around the world can be directly traced to the ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America’s cultural left.
D’Souza shows that liberals–people like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, Bill Moyers, and Michael Moore–are responsible for fostering a culture that angers and repulses not just Muslim countries but also traditional and religious societies around the world.
[…]
He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom–from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.
The cultural wars at home and the global war on terror are usually viewed as separate problems. In this groundbreaking book, D’Souza shows that they are one and the same. It is only by curtailing the left’s attacks on religion, family, and traditional values that we can persuade moderate Muslims and others around the world to cooperate with us and begin to shun the extremists in their own countries.
After 9/11, a few libertarians and leftists made the case that perhaps we ought to examine our own foreign policy, and see if U.S. interventions may be spurring anti-American hatred around the world. Those critics were roundly ridiculed, and their theory — sometimes called “blowback” — was dismissed as “unserious.” They were called “appeasers.”
Seems to me that if the publisher’s description is accurate, D’Souza’s forthcoming book is much more insidious, much more offensive, and much less believable than those “unserious” realists, about a hundred times over. D’Souza is basically arguing that the terrorists hate us for our freedom, and, therefore, we should “curtail” our freedoms to appease them. Actually, it’s worse than that. He’s blaming freedom itself, along with his political opponents, for provoking September 11. In fact, he’s treading perilously close to suggesting we make our society more like a fundamentalist Islamic society so the fundamentalist Muslims will be less likely to hate us. I don’t think I can come up with a more offensive explanation for why 9/11 happened if someone paid me.
Now, compare libertarian critiques of U.S. foreign policy with D’Souza’s insinuation that the cultural left motivated 9/11. Which is more palpable? Which is more likely to inspire an angry young Muslim man to pick up and move to the United States, live and train here for years, then carry out a suicide attack:
(A) That he sees U.S. troops and U.S. military equipment in Muslim holy lands; reads the names of U.S. companies on Israeli missiles and weapons used against Palestiniana; and sees reports of U.S. sanctions starving Iraqi children…
…or…
(B) He is aware that American women take birth control, gay couples can get married in Massachusetts, and — I can’t believe anyone would take D’Souza seriously as a thinker after this — no-fault divorce.
Also, echoing Noah, what in the world could D’Souza mean by “It is only by curtailing the left’s attacks on religion, family, and traditional values…”?
Is he suggesting that critics of family values policies not be allowed to criticize them? Is he suggesting we outlaw “women’s sexual liberation?” Should we forbid Hollywood from “exporting” our “vulgar and licentious culture?”
In a just world, claims like this would push D’Souza to the far margins of serious debate. Sadly, instead, it’ll probably help him sell a lot of books.
[The Agitator]
This guy sounds like a long-winded version of that religious fanatic (Pat Robertson?) who proclaimed that 9/11 was his god’s punishment on America for being insufficiently bigoted.