The Enemy at Home: Dinesh D’Souza Takes Sides in the War on Terror

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 This claim was elaborated in an unpublished text later sent to me by a retired member of the Norwegian Parliament who blamed 9/11 on the stateside degenerates—principally “homosexual heroes and anal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.

I should have said 'inexplicable (to me)'. I'll have nothing to do with whitewashing evil when and where I find it, nor will I keep silent when I see such whitewashing being attempted.

I haven't read his book either but despising the cultural LEFT in this nation is NOT something I find offensive.

The left has been very active for a generation DEFINING DEVIANCY DOWN and they have been amply rewarded for their hard work.

Just take a look around it smacks you right in the face, daily!!

In this case of whitewashing, it's like painting a tree white. Sure, it's now a lovely shade of eggshell, and made of wood, but that doesn't make it a wall.

I understand where President Bush and folks like D'Souza are coming from. They clearly see a horrific global struggle on our doorstep, and are trying to avert the worst of it. I just don't know if treating Americans like children who can't handle the truth is going to work in this case. At some point, people are going to feel duped by this "religion of peace" talk, and the backlash could be worse than had we tackled the problem in it's infancy.

Thanks, Spencer is spot on IMHO and thorough.

In fact, there was an article in the NY Times the other day, about "islamophobic" books where both Spencer's and Bawer's books were mentioned. Bawer's "While Europe slept" is nominated for some critical award, and the ususal suspects are up in arms :-)

If you have not read the book Dinesh is right on on most of what he says. It is a great book. The poster is obviously gay and does not want any of his so called gays rights disturbed with. Dinesh does take take Bin ladens side but tries to explain to us in the west how a large part of Muslims look at us and the ongoing lack of morals and religion by the left. .It is a good read and my copy is currently being passed around work with everyone liking it.

This author, Bruce Bawer, is way over the top in his title and his article.

Robert Spencer seems to have appointed himself as a D'Souza neutralizer. His energy is better spent documenting Islam's extremism, past and present. D'Souza is usually worth a read. Do you have to agree? Of course not. I think the issue is balance and that can be hard to achieve.

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.

I agree.

Does American sexual decadence help fuel terrorism? Probably so. Does the American Left give terrorists hope and thereby fuel terrorism? Yes. Would we placate Islamic terrorists if we were all morale, pro-market, patriotic Americans in all our words and deeds? I don’t think so.

I wish, for what that’s worth, that we would step away from the gay (“anal addicts” seems right) choice. I wish we were all at least as patriotic as D’Souza. But these things aren’t going to happen soon, if at all. In the mean time, I support free speech by D’Souza and others.

I see nothing wrong with Dinesh taking a foreigners view of our moral decline to help Americans better understand the views of our enemies. I'm sure most Americans disagree with the moral decline and would like to see it reversed. In the end, though, I'm not sure this will change anything in teh eyes of Muslims. Thanks to globalization, funds for terrorists have become abundant from oil wealth and Arab nations have chosen to funnel this money to radical Islamists and today we're reaping the results. We should never have set back quietly while Saudi Arabia funneled billions to Wahhabists. We should never have opened our doors to immigration from Muslims countries. Of course, our own Jimmy Carter lost Iran, launching us into this current period of history.

My brother, who isn't particularly virtuous or religious, said this as we sat and watched Janet Jackson's breast be bared on World Wide TV:

'No wonder these countries hate us.'

And I think his comment speak to the point of just what we look like to other cultures who aren't being fed the types of images everyday we are fed everyday.

I hope you meant to say that Dinesh does NOT take bin Laden's side.

That said, his observation that many muslims hate the West because of Hollywood doesn't seem to square with my albeit limitited experiences. With most muslims I meet, it seems like Hollywood is the only think they actually DO like.

Unless it it movies involving muslim terrorists off course :-)

I think the writer is on to something. First, I admit I haven't read the book. But I was at a conference at Hillsdale College in October where the main speaker was George Gilder. Gilder, of course, is the author of "Wealth & Poverty," which champions human liberty as the essential ingredient of wealth creation; and Gilder has written extensively on the blessings of the internet---again, mainly due to freedom.

So I was shocked to see him champion this book and argue for CENSORSHIP, praising the CHINESE and their "control" of the internet. Indeed, Gilder spent his entire speech basically hyping this book. It was the old "blame-the-victim" approach: we deserved 9/11 because of what he called "pornocopia." Please. I'm no fan of Gay San Fran, but to blame American morality (or lack thereof) for "causing" jihad is beyond stupid.

My brother, who isn't particularly virtuous or religious, said this as we sat and watched Janet Jackson's breast be bared on World Wide TV: 'No wonder these countries hate us.'

European TV regularly shows nudity in prime time and they don't even blink an eye. Compared with Europe, America is still relatively prudish.

I have seen and heard D'Souza give a variety of interviews recently. Perhaps he is rewriting his book on the fly in these interviews but his main point seems to be that America's prominent decadence (Hollywood, global Planned Parenthood affiliates, etc..) is routinely held up as our only attribute by extremists. This technique is used to turn moderates, the overwhelming majority of Muslims, into extremists. He's argued that America was quite popular in the 50's in the Arab world, but that has changed dramatically in recent decades. I haven't heard him call for censorship at all, though I haven't read his book yet.

It may be true that America was more popular in the 1950s with Arabs/Muslims because we basically supported whatever strongman we could vs. the commies, and half the population was therefore on "our side." But we have a much different strategy now: that FREEDOM and human liberty are absolutely necessary to root out terrorism, which comes from jihadist kooks. An unfortunate side-effect of liberty is libertinism, but that has always been so. I vote on the side of liberty, of making these jihadists confront their internal contradictions. You don't do that by insulating them from outside ideas---because it's FAR more than just the sexual revolution they oppose. They oppose the very concept of human liberty.

Agree. Or how about Latin America, where women walk around nude on beaches. It's an excuse for people to hate us, not a reason. And if you remove that excuse, they will find another.

He's argued that America was quite popular in the 50's in the Arab world

But back then there really weren't any alternatives. Most didn't care for the Soviet Union, and Europe was still rebuilding from the end of WWII. Also, fundamentalist Islam had yet to take hold as it has today.

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