Posted on 02/09/2007 4:42:33 AM PST by Eurotwit
It may be hard to imagine today, but on 9/11 the thought actually crossed my mind that America’s social divisions would now melt away, or at least radically diminish. After the fall of the Twin Towers, how could anyone continue to believe (or pretend to believe) that gays, for example, were a real threat to America? Surely the U.S. would unite in defense of its freedoms—everybody’s freedoms—and in opposition to the jihadists.
For a moment, that seemed to be happening. Then the finger-pointing started. Leftists railed that America had gotten its payback for imperialism; Jerry Falwell insisted that pagans, abortionists, gays, and others of that ilk had “helped this happen.” This claim was elaborated in an unpublished text later sent to me by a retired member of the Norwegian Parliament who blamed 9/11 on the stateside degenerates—principally “homosexual heroes and anal addicts” (yes, “anal addicts”)—who offend Muslim family values. Now right-wing hack Dinesh D’Souza makes this same accusation in a jaw-droppingly repulsive screed, The Enemy at Home. Charging that “the cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11,” he wants good Christians to recognize that Islamic values resemble their own—and that the real enemy is those fags next door. If only they’d retarget their rage, thereby showing their respect for “traditional values,” Muslims would stop hating the USA.
D’Souza (who says he is Catholic) invites us to “imagine how American culture looks and feels to someone who has been raised in a traditional society… where homosexuality is taboo and against the law…. One can only imagine the Muslim reaction to televised scenes of homosexual men exchanging marriage vows in San Francisco and Boston.” Let it be recalled that D’Souza is referring here to a “traditional society” in which girls of 13 or 14 are routinely forced to marry their cousins, and in which the groom, if his conjugal attentions are resisted on the wedding night, is encouraged by his new in-laws to take his bride by force. Such are the sensitivities that, D’Souza laments, are so deeply offended by the American left, which “would like to have Mapplethorpe’s photographs and Brokeback Mountain seen in every country… the left wants America to be a shining beacon of golden depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill.”
This isn’t entirely new territory for D’Souza. In What’s So Great about America? (2002), while celebrating the U.S. for enabling him—an immigrant from India—to achieve “a life that made me feel true to myself,” he condemned as contemptibly self-indulgent others who sought to be true to themselves. The West, he summed up, is “based on freedom,” Islam “on virtue”; while praising the latter, he claimed (ultimately) to prefer the former—though it seemed a close call, for while freedom for the likes of himself is cool, freedom for certain others is merely a license to sin. In any event, he’s now firmly in the “virtue” camp. He still claims to prize freedom—he just doesn’t like what some people have done with it. Hence he recommends a more Islamic (i.e., Orwellian) definition of “freedom”—namely the kind of “freedom” in which newly free citizens hold free elections in which they vote in authoritarians who promise to impose sharia.
As for “virtue”—well, D’Souza fumes for pages at length about the moral corruption of everything from Pulp Fiction and Jerry Springer to Britney Spears and Will and Grace, ardently contrasting all this vice and filth to the glorious uprightness of Muslim family values. Forget the sky-high rates of wife-beating and intrafamily rape in Muslim households; forget the stoning to death of gays and rape victims—D’Souza offers only scattered, rote, and understated acknowledgments that Muslim domestic culture might not be 100 percent morally pure (“There is, of course, no excuse for the abuses of patriarchy”). He ignores the Muslim schoolbooks and media that routinely depict Jews as subhumans who merit extinction; he winks at the current persecution of “traditional, family oriented” Christians (and Hindus) across the Muslim world; and he pretends that “most traditional Muslims” condemn honor killings. (On the contrary, when European Muslims slaughter their daughters, journalists struggle to find coreligionists who’ll criticize them for doing so.)
He’s quick to warn, moreover, that in discussing potentially troubling aspects of Muslim culture, “we should be on guard against the blinders of ethnocentrism.” In short, while inviting conservative Christians to buy the idea that Muslim family values are essentially equivalent to their own, he wants them to overlook the multitudinous—and profoundly disturbing—ways in which they aren’t. He labors consistently to minimize this value gap—and thereby reinforce his argument that today’s terrorism (far from perpetrating a centuries-long tradition of violent jihad) is, quite simply, a reaction to America’s post-’60s moral dissipation. He would have his readers believe that if only the U.S. returned to the values of the Eisenhower era, our Muslim adversaries would let us be. But he deliberately obscures the mountains of evidence that for “traditional Muslims,” even small-town 1940s America wouldn’t do. For example, in sympathetically describing the outraged response of Sayyid Qutb, the father of modern Islamism, to America’s debauchery, D’Souza neatly skirts the fact that Qutb first witnessed that debauchery at a church dance in the then-dry burg of Greeley, Colorado, in 1948—a year when, as Robert Spencer has noted, the highlights of America’s decadent pop culture included the movie Easter Parade and Dinah Shore’s recording of “Buttons and Bows.”
Promoting his tract on TV, D’Souza has consistently softened and misrepresented its message. His January 28 reply to critics, which ran in the Washington Post, is a masterpiece of dissembling: he complains that Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert hounded him with the question “But you agree with the Islamic radicals, don’t you?”—but fails to mention that he finally replied “Yes.” Indeed, though he purports to disdain those radicals, he writes about them far more compassionately than about anyone on the American left: Among the images he strives to improve are those of Theo van Gogh’s murderer (he quotes out of context a sensitive-sounding courtroom remark the butcher made to his victim’s mother), of bin Ladin and Khomeini (both of whom, we’re told, are “highly regarded” for their “modest demeanor, frugal lifestyle, and soft-spoken manner”), of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi (whose criticism of gay marriage he approvingly cites, while omitting to note that Qaradawi also supports the death sentence for sodomites), and even of the 9/11 terrorists (D’Souza excerpts the goodbye letter one of them sent his wife, which he plainly finds noble and poignant).
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.
Having not read the book, I would find it most difficult to take this reviewers interpretation.
Looks to me like this "probably" queer writer (author of the article) really hates Dinesh.
because they are trying to trash him for speaking the truth.
I have always found Dinesh to be most reasonable when he appears on various shows, altho I did catch Glenn Beck having a meltdown when he began his segment with Dinesh....CLICK! Have no idea how that went.
The D’Souza Follies
It's not an either or. We don't have to object to either the radical gay agenda or Islamic fascism. We can sensibly reject BOTH.
bump for later read
Bruce Bawer is gay and is the author of "While Europe slept".
Albeit charaterizing myself as a social conservative, I still don't want the government to impose a state authorized morality upon people.
That is, I lean libertarian and think morality is a highly personal issue, and any government attempts to enforce morality will inevitebly tend to lead to faux morality, hypocracy and corruption.
As for Dinesh, I find his argument (not having read the book, mind you) wrongheaded on two accounts.
1 - It is simply not credible that such a change he advocated would appease (deliberate choice of word) our enemies
2 - To my mind, even suggesting that we should change our way of life in order to let these bullies leave us alone is repulsive to me as a freedomloving patriot.
Cheers.
He certainly does! BTTT!
Oh, and let me add a third point:
3 - The blame for 911 belongs squarely on the head of bin Laden et al. and their Saudi enablers.
Cheers
I agree, but not with D-Souza line of agument behind it.
Fighting the gay agenda does not in my church involve joining forces with people who literally want gay people's heads on stakes.
Cheers.
Call me old fashioned, but I would like to live in a free society where people are allowed to make their own opinions on what is moral. A society where people have a choice to watch Jerry Springer or the Disney channel. To blame America's "moral depravity" for Islamofacism is an absolute joke and D'Souza deserves to ripped for it. What do you think? If we went back to the "Leave It To Beaver" (as so many Freepers long for) days, the Muzzies would lay down their arms and say, "Gee, those infidels really ain't that bad." Look at the Jews in Israel, many of them are ultra-Orthodox, you don't see a slow down in Mohammeds wanting to blow them up. An infidel is an infidel is an infidel.
Spencer on Bennett's show right now.
Thanks...
He's quite right that we need to clean up our act. But we need to do so because it's the right thing to do, not because it will appease the mohammedans (which won't happen no matter what we do).
If you think about it, D'Souza's position is simply a more in-depth restating of President Bush's "It's a religion of peace" rhetoric. Certainly, D'Souza deserves no less and no more criticism than the President himself. He's trying to prevent a global war by making friends out of enemies. I don't know how effective it will be. As the old saying goes, it may be black, but you can't polish a turd. The "Islam and the West have a lot in common line" requires a lot of suspension of disbelief, perhaps too much to actually get off the ground.
brucebawer.com
The personal website of Bruce Bawer, writer and translator.
Recent pieces
On same-sex partnership in Norway THREEPENNY REVIEW, Fall 2001
"'Are you married?' people often ask us here in Norway, where we now live. 'Yes,' I reply. They hear the answer knowing it comes with an asterisk: yes, in Norway - his country, their country - we're married; back in my own homeland, the United States of America, we're not."
On the mainstreaming of gay America NEW YORK TIMES, January 26, 2001
"The most significant social change in the United States during the Clinton presidency was the social mainstreaming of gay Americans and the ebbing of antigay prejudice."
He's quite right that we need to clean up our act. But we need to do so because it's the right thing to do, not because it will appease the mohammedans (which won't happen no matter what we do).
You're right about the cleaning up. Unfortunately, many people think that the only way to be free involves thumbing their nose at God.
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