Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home

...We can't believe it's chauvinism or a prescription for reckless military intervention to say to other countries (as the European Union is saying to Turkey or as we did to South Africa under apartheid) that enshrine discrimination or brutality as law that we consider them in violation of civilized standards of human rights...

...Which is why, as liberals, we have to be willing to say the obvious without fearing that we will be thought of as ugly Americans...

...But he sees nothing wrong with blaring hip-hop and hard rock at prisoners as a method of torture, even though those being tortured are the same people he credits with adhering to high moral standards...

...So we get accusations of racial profiling leveled at Aayan Hirsi Ali's proposal to have young female immigrants to Holland from Islamic countries examined yearly to make sure they haven't suffered clitoridectomy...

...There are liberals who believe that as well...

...In other words, only an arrogant Westerner would consider this state of things a violation of basic justice, to say nothing of common sense...

...Pat Robertson may have predicted that a giant hurricane would strike Disney World on the day set aside for gay visitors but he didn't suggest that his followers would achieve righteousness by bombing the place...

...It's understandable that at a time when America is DISSENT / Summer 2007 n 103 BOOKS widely hated in the world, and when American power has come to stand for little more than belligerence, people are unwilling to risk seeming like the ugly American...

...We should always complain when anything threatens the separation of church and state...

...You had to wonder, if the fatwa against Salman Rushdie were to occur today, would Weinberger and his ilk conclude Rushdie had been culturally insensitive...

...The outrage was seeing Muslims subjected to the moral depravity of blue-state America...

...He hastens to assure us that Muslims are not "enemies of individual freedom" and "that they support basic freedoms"— just not "the right to blaspheme against Islam, the right to sex before marriage, the right to no-fault divorce, the right to abort one's offspring, or homosexual rights...

...Even as Bush's approval rating goes lower and lower, even as evangelicals issue statements condemning torture and take up the issue of global warming, it's not uncommon to hear liberals say that America is on the verge of a fundamentalist takeover...

...That's why the conservative complaint about 'liberal guilt' is so beside the point . . . , When a leftist .. . expresses outrage at 'what we did at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib,' the speaker does not mean 'what I and other people like me did.' In formulations like this 'we' really means 'you.'" As liberals, we are always tempted to see the ugliest aspects of America and American power not as a desecration of what we believe but as a confirmation of everything rotten about the country...

...While Europe Slept is a problematic, occasionally exasperating book...

...I was one of them...

...But it's not the work of a bigot...

...D'Souza shares the Islamic radicals' disgust with contemporary America, which he sees as a sewer of unutterable depravity...

...It doesn't much matter that D'Souza is courting "traditional Muslims," the phrase he uses to denote those who don't share the radical Muslim belief in terrorism...

...BUT THE BIGGEST mistake the left could make with this book would be to be smug about either it or the conservatives who fail to distance themselves from it—as Alan Wolfe suggested they should, in a reasoned but impassioned demolition in the New York Times Book Review, a review that encouraged George Gilder to declare solidarity with D'Souza, and William F. Buckley, Jr...

...male infidelity is ignored while honor killings are used against women who are unfaithful...

...When Congress acts as it did in the Terri Schiavo case...

...To achieve this, D'Souza, seeing what he believes is an obvious alliance, ominously calls for the American right to "convince traditional Mus102 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 lims that there are two Americas, and that one of these has a lot in common with them...

...As fawning as it is, as much as his argument relies on diminishing the repressiveness or even the violence of Islamic society, I believe D'Souza's vision of Islamic belief more than the apologias I hear made by some of my fellow liberals...

...Going Joe McCarthy one better, he helpfully supplies a list of names...

...Every criticism Bawer ventured about this state of things resulted in his being told he was being intolerant of immigrants who felt uncomfortable in a new culture...

...I believe D'Souza when he says that secular intellectuals have next to no influence in most Islamic countries...

...It's not true that most Muslim countries are democracies...

...But we've reached the point where even insisting that there is a threat from radical Islam can be enough to get you accused of shilling for Bush's foreign policy...

...It would be a betrayal of everything the left is supposed to stand for if we confused affirming liberal principles with arrogance and assented to his judgment...

...D'Souza slyly claims that most Muslims live under democracy—which is true only because Indonesia is home to the world's largest Muslim population...

...But, says this enemy of moral relativism, "In order to assess Islamic society, we should be on guard against the blinders of ethnocentrism...

...The abortion workers who have been killed and maimed, the clinics bombed are the exception not the rule in fundamentalist Christianity, and such acts have usually been condemned by the religious right...

...D'Souza doesn't believe in the word "terrorists" because, he says, terrorism is a tactic...

...And when we do that, we're implying we are no longer a part of America, thus seconding D'Souza's implicit message that there are some people who belong here and some who don't...

...That claim is followed by a passage detailing the treatment of women under sharia: Women inherit half of what men do...

...THE ENEMY AT HOME THE CULTURAL LEFT AND ITS RESPONSIBILITY FOR 9/11 By Dinesh D'Souza Doubleday, 2006 352 pp $26.95 DINESH D' SouzA's The Enemy at Home is a declaration of common cause with people who have declared themselves against the basic concept of democracy...

...D'Souza, he is careful to point out, does not support terrorism...

...We can no longer afford to believe we're echoing the thuggishness emanating from the White House to say we believe democracy is better than theocracy or that it's boasting to say we believe there's more justice, more humanity, in a society that tries, however imperfectly, to treat people equally regardless of their sex or sexual orientation...

...There is no moral difference between D'Souza's craven attempt to make common cause with Islamic repression and the message Michael Moore left on his Web site on the evening of September I I , 2001, saying that if the terrorists wanted to punish Bush, then they had mistakenly bombed the places that voted against him...

...Meanwhile, D'Souza dreams of halting democracy at home...

...That's the behavior Dinesh D'Souza considers liberal cultural imperialism...

...He tells us that what angered the Muslim world about the photos from Abu Ghraib isn't the fact that Muslims were tortured—radical Muslims expect to be tortured, he says...

...the testimony of a Muslim woman in court carries half the weight of the testimony of a man...

...The question The Enemy at Home leaves you with is, why not...

...The Enemy at Home is one of those occasions when a public intellectual—or, in this case, a public crackpot—expresses a view so appalling it becomes incumbent on others to state where they stand in relation to it...

...THIS STORY MAY explain what I mean...

...He ridicules liberals, like the ones in Jimmy Carter's administration, for undermining dictators friendly to America (such as the shah of Iran) because, he says, America's ideals do not always align with its interests (Though, if the shah's fall gave Islamic extremism a foothold in the Middle East, didn't the neocon idealism that led to the fall of Saddam Hussein do the same thing...

...Would murdering red-state Americans have been comprehensible...

...When it was the poet Eliot Weinberger's turn to announce the nominees in the criticism category, he said he was embarrassed to have to read the title of Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within...

...As Patricia Cohen reported in the New York Times (February 8, 2007), Weinberger's outburst was greeted by boos from several people present...

...And he is so lost in his fantasy of Muslim moral rectitude that he claims women in Muslim countries enjoy rights comparable to women in the West...

...You'd need the mobility of a plumber's snake to follow the convolutions of D'Souza's arguments here (and a similar willingness to plunge into dark, scummy places...

...In one of those very few things D'Souza gets right, he says, "When the left says 'we' it . . . is not intended as self-incrimination...

...BUT IDENTIFYING D'Souza as a collaborationist who dreams of a society that few Americans of any political stripe would recognize as democracy is not something that should necessarily comfort the left...

...That the participants in orgies are usually willing escapes him...

...It means acknowledging precisely what many on the left have refused to—that what many moderate Muslims identify as democracy is in fact profoundly undemocratic, and that the beliefs held by radical Muslims are not a revolutionary response to Western imperialism but the latest manifestation of fascism (which Paul Berman argued so eloquently in Terror and Liberalism...

...It was a smug little piece of cocktail chat about the undesirability of mixing with "those" people...

...But when we're threatened by groups that, as D'Souza says admiringly, "identify their struggle [notice—not campaign of terror, but struggle] in religious terms," it's equally foolish to claim that nativity scenes on public property and prayer at football games herald the same threat...

...Bawer's partner was gay-bashed by a Muslim man (the same man whom, a few weeks earlier, he had chastised for the public hostility that the man and his wife were showing a lesbian couple...

...I'm BOOKS sorry," he said, "but I don't think bigotry is criticism...

...His vision is of America as the altar of a West-East theocracy that would root out any American who doesn't share its values...

...D'Souza has a tenuous grasp of the idea of democracy which, for him, equals any popularly elected government...

...He's also a conservative, but he's hardly far right...

...In The Enemy at Home, D'Souza claims that the American left makes up a "domestic insurgency...

...who was careful to note he hadn't read the book and rejected its thesis) to falsely claim Wolfe was acting as "universal censor for the book-readDISSENT / Summer 2007 n 105 BOOKS ing world...

...Where is the acknowledgment," Sontag wrote, "that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on `civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions...

...D'Souza at least identifies what he believes are the causes of Muslim rage...

...The contradictions pile up page by page...

...In this reactionary romance, the left, hating Bush more than Osama bin Laden, wants to see the president defeated...

...D'Souza's laundry list of the diseases that afflict American society is almost exactly what you find in the "moral thrust" (D'Souza's phrase) of bin Laden's November 2002 "Letter to America," which he quotes: "Immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling...

...The answer to the first charge is simple: How many Baptists have flown planes into buildings or blown themselves up in public places...

...Sontag believes these alliances and actions are so self-evident they need not be named...

...But we give away the moral and intellectual force of our arguments for what America should be if we signal that we're proud of feeling alienated from our country or imply that it can never make an attempt to live up to its ideals...

...We can't believe it's hypocritical to trumpet the flawed justice we have attained just because it doesn't measure up to an unattainable ideal...

...Had Lynndie England and Charles Graner been "professors at an elite liberal arts college," D'Souza claims, "their videotaped orgies might BOOKS easily have become the envy of academia...

...Both D'Souza and Sontag treat America under attack in the same way defense attorneys used to treat rape victims: they claim she was asking for it...

...the sex trade in all its forms .. diseases such as AIDS that were unknown to man in the past . . . you separate religion from your politics [and] contradict the authority of the Lord and Creator...

...How many theaters showing The Da Vinci Code have been firebombed...

...We can't believe we are showing contempt for other cultures when we say to people of those cultures that, if they move to our countries, we won't tolerate practices that oppose our commitment to that equality...

...CHARLES TAYLOR is a columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger and a contributor to the New York Times, Newsday, the New York Observer, the Nation, and other publications...

...I don't think there's any denying that the left has been skittish, equivocating, and far less reluctant to condemn the repression of women, homosexuals, free speech, and scientific inquiry in Islamic society, repressions that are in perfect consonance with the expressed religious ideals of those societies, than it has been to condemn Bush's attack on our civil liberties...

...This suggests that life in academia is more fun than many of us suppose...

...He records large numbers of immigrant Muslim women being abused...

...One of the stranger things about The Enemy at Home is the way D'Souza winds up echoing some of the most mindless aspects of the left...

...That perfectly describes liberals who insist—with straight faces—that American fundamentalism is just as much of a threat as Islamic fundamentalism...

...You are a nation that permits acts of immorality and consider them to be pillars of personal freedom...

...But D'Souza faults people who distribute condoms to teenagers or who attempt to introduce some form of family planning in the rest of the world, or who claim abstinence programs are ineffective and put lives at risk, for believing "abstinence advocacy is . . . ineffective and even harmful because . . . it has no chance of restricting teen sexual behavior...

...In fact he cites the statement as indicative of bin Laden's "moral thrust...

...His main reason for moving was the rise of Protestant fundamentalism in America...

...Insulting both Bawer and his colleagues who had chosen the book, Weinberger acted as an intellectual thug...

...Understanding that Muslims, given the chance at democratic elections, will establish states ruled by the traditional morality they despise, the left wants to halt the potential for democracy in the Middle East...

...Perhaps in his effort to show that both the right and the left have failed to see the logic of bin Laden's terrorism, D'Souza registers no disapproval at bin Laden's statement that "America calls those who oppose its policies 'terrorist' while its own war crimes and those of Israel against Muslim populations are ignored and excused...

...He shows no objection to bin Laden's belief that terrorism can be good or bad depending on who's using it and against whom...

...Under sharia, the separation doesn't exist--even as a concept...

...In other words, D'Souza's understanding of democracy is a theocracy that limits, if not prohibits, freedom of speech, and in which not only abortion and homosexuality are illegal but sex before marriage...

...But it doesn't matter if your Satan is Britney Spears or Donald Rumsfeld...

...In Holland, he found a religion-based intolerance far worse than any rhetoric he encountered in America...

...men can divorce easily and wear Western clothing, women cannot and wear veils and burqas...

...D'Souza claims the United States practices cultural imperialism by polluting the world with its filthy pop culture...

...Bawer is a gay American critic who, in 1998, moved to Holland (later to Oslo) with his Norwegian partner...

...when religious groups successfully put up roadblocks to stem-cell research...

...I believe that his (approving) vision of a society in which male dominance keeps women legally subservient (and even legally abused or, sometimes, killed) is a reality...

...I don't know if he had read the book—or if the title was simply enough for him to decide what was inside...

...Of course, it's racial profiling—young Western women aren't in danger of having their clitorises cut out in the name of keeping them virtuous...

...Bawer has a tendency toward overly dramatic rhetoric (as that subtitle attests) and there is a frustrating lack of citation for some of his more damning accusations...

...He respects the radicals for their commitment to a strict "traditional" moral code—none more so than Osama bin Laden, whom he dotes on in passages that suggest a schoolboy crush: "Just about everyone who has met bin Laden describes him as a quiet, well-mannered, thoughtful, eloquent, and deeply religious man . . . it is remarkable that a man born into a multimillion-dollar empire, a man who could be on a yacht in San Tropez with a blonde on one arm and a brunette on the other, has chosen to live in a cave in Afghanistan and risk his life for his beliefs...

...After citing a Pew Research Center poll that most Muslims believe a Westernstyle democracy would work in their countries, he goes on: "For traditional Muslims, selfrule also means the right to establish a society under God's rule and governed, at least in some aspects, by Islamic law...

...when, in the midst of a public-health epidemic, we can't ensure the distribution of condoms and clean needles, you'd have to be foolish to deny that fundamentalist religion exerts too much influence on public policy...

...President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the Oval Office . . . a nation that permits gambling in all its forms...

...With this book, D'Souza has become something like our Robert Brasillach, the French writer who, during the Occupation, was an enthusiastic propagandist for the Nazis...

...But we can't deny that, despite encroachments, that separation exists as law...

...Wolfe had not called for censorship of any kind...

...That reluctance has several sources...

...Even when America is respected abroad, as it was during the Clinton years, multiculturalism has been interpreted to mean that it's racist for any Westerner to criticize a nonwestern culture...

...Pauline Kael once referred to people who think they're "serving the interests of democracy when they ask us to deny the evidence of our senses...

...In 2005, the graphic artist Milton Glaser went on the PBS program Now and, holding up an anti-communist button from the fifties that said "Better Dead Than Red," told host David Brancaccio, "Now, those of us who live in the blue states can wear it with a certain amount of pride...

...In January, the National Book Critics Circle held an event in New York at which the nominees for the group's yearly awards were announced...

...He doesn't, for instance, explain why liberals would want to prevent a morally conservative Middle Eastern democracy when the alternative would be to ensure the victory of radicals who'd establish the strictest sort of theocracy...

...Refuting the second charge, that we're on the verge of a fundamentalist takeover, is harder, not because there aren't facts with which to do so, but because facts don't matter 104 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 to the paranoid mind-set...

...In other words, while tolerating dictators may be a realistic and necessary component of our foreign policy, the lives of American teens and people in the third world are expendable in the name of a moral ideal that trumps the public-health interest in arresting a global pandemic...

...He posits the depraved, atheistic values of the American left as the source of Muslim anger toward America and concludes that terrorism can't be defeated abroad unless the left is defeated at home...

...But it was remarkable to be in a room of New York literati who would overwhelmingly identify themselves as liberal and yet remain silent as a writer is insulted for decrying homophobia and misogyny...

...106 n DISSENT / Summer 2007...

...None of this means that, when talking of things like Abu Ghraib or some other national shame, we should indulge in shows of "everyone is guilty" breast-beating (if everyone is guilty, no one is...

...His contention that Islamic terrorists have been driven to their crimes by the rottenness of American society and by feminists and those whose work abroad aims to undermine traditional Muslim society is an odd echo of Susan Sontag's infamous 9/11 piece for the New Yorker...