Bin Laden, the Left, and Me (Dinesh D'Souza)

As a conservative author, I'm used to a little controversy. Even so, the reaction to my new book, "The Enemy at Home," has felt, well, a little hysterical.

"Ratfink writes new book," James Wolcott, cultural critic for Vanity Fair, declares in his blog. He goes on to call my book a "sleazy, shameless, ignorant, ahistorical, tendentious, meretricious lie."

In the pages of Esquire, Mark Warren charges that I "hate America" and have "taken to heart" Osama bin Laden's view of the United States. (Warren also challenged me to a fight and threatened to put me in the hospital.) In his New York Times review of my book last week, Alan Wolfe calls my work "a national disgrace . . . either self-delusional or dishonest." I am "a childish thinker" with "no sense of shame," he argues. "D'Souza writes like a lover spurned; despite all his efforts to reach out to Bin Laden, the man insists on joining forces with the Satanists."

Why the onslaught? Just this: In my book, published this month, I argue that the American left bears a measure of responsibility for the volcano of anger from the Muslim world that produced the 9/11 attacks. President Jimmy Carter's withdrawal of support for the shah of Iran, for example, helped Ayatollah Khomeini's regime come to power in Iran, thus giving radical Islamists control of a major state; and President Bill Clinton's failure to respond to Islamic attacks confirmed bin Laden's perceptions of U.S. weakness and emboldened him to strike on 9/11. I also argue that the policies that U.S. "progressives" promote around the world -- including abortion rights, contraception for teenagers and gay rights -- are viewed as an assault on traditional values by many cultures, and have contributed to the blowback of Islamic rage.

I agree. D'Souza neglects the fact that Islam has always hated and wanted to dominate Christians and the West in general, long before abortion was legal and girls appeared in public in slutty clothing. Islamic "morality" is a patchwork of peculiar legal practices that permit 20-minute "convenience marriages," sex with animals and young boys, divorce of any of your multiple wives by simply saying the words "I divorce you," and the practice of chattel slavery with the treatment of the slaves as animals for sexual use. While they (theoretically) do not drink alcohol, virtually all males in traditional Islamic countries spend much of their day stoned on hash or qat. Not exactly a shining beacon, in my mind.

Islam can't attack the West when the West is powerful, and it doesn't even try; it only attacks when it perceives that the West is weak. What has happened now is not that Islam is enraged by the "immorality" of the West but that it has been encouraged by the weakness and dividedness of the West. D'Souza is right in assigning the blame for that to Carter and Clinton.

But the blame for Islam's hatred of us has nothing to do with our vices; it has to do with our virtues, such as respect for human individuality, the idea that human beings are created in the image of God and have certain God-given rights, and the creativity that wells up from a culture that respects reason and flows from a view of a rational universe created by a loving God. In other words, Islam's hatred of us flows from its own perverted and negative belief system.

What we have to do is keep them from thinking they might be strong enough to impose that system on us, and our ideological weakness and lack of committment to the positive values of our world-view, as expressed by Carter, Clinton and, to some extent, D'Souza, are what is encouraging them to think they might have a chance.

I lived overseas during the 1980s and saw the embarrassing offerings that American television provided to the world. All those night time soap operas led people to believe American women were like Joan Collins.

And why were these particular shows on TV in your host country? Because that's what the local market wanted!. Hollywood doesn't send out ninjas to force foreign countries to do their bidding unless it's an RIAA case.

Even as the cultural left accuses Bush of imperialism in invading Iraq, it deflects attention from its own cultural imperialism aimed at secularizing Muslim society and undermining its patriarchal and traditional values.

If the Cultural Left is undermining a depraved culture that exudes its rotten pus in the form of terror and murder, then

RAH! RAH! GO CULTURAL LEFT!!

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