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From
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/books/review/Wolfe.t.html?ref=books
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BOOK REVIEW
THE 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.
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January 21, 2007
None (but Me) Dare Call It Treason
By ALAN WOLFE
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.
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.
The domestic insurgents who, in D'Souza's view, constitute
the cultural left want America to be a shining beacon of
global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill.
I intend to name the enemy at home, D'Souza proclaims, and
so he does. Twenty recent members of Congress, including
Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ted Kennedy, are on one of his
lists, and 17 intellectuals (one dead, one British) are on
another, with similar numbers of Hollywood figures,
activists, foreign policy experts, cultural leaders and
organizations.
Some of those he identifies -- Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark,
Ward Churchill -- might not be surprised to find themselves
here. Others -- the sociologist Paul Starr, the historian
Sean Wilentz, the clergyman Jim Wallis, the philosopher
Martha Nussbaum -- are less obvious candidates for inclusion.
(One person, Thomas Frank, is
