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 This claim was elaborated in an unpublished text later sent to me by a retired member of the Norwegian Parliament who blamed 9/11 on the stateside degenerates—principally “homosexual heroes and anal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.
Honestly. You are so deluded.
Quit thinking about Spears et al.
You know.
World War 2 American Army would have finished the jiad in a year.
Cheers.
I think there is no (living) culture on earth that celebrates sodomy as much as the islamic one.
Let me clarify my position. I am not exactly clear as to what D'Souza was saying, so I shouldn't have jumped the gun.
However, I doubt that D'Sousza is arguing that Islamofascism has a right to do what they do because of what Hollywood does. We are entitled to live our lives regardless of how they think we should live.
If Hollywood is going to blame to the US's global position in the world's economy and support Israel for Islamofascism, then D'Sousza is correct in saying that Hollywood has to bear the same responsibility.
If he is just blaming the Islamofascism on our culture, then D'Souza would be wrong. I should have read enough of it to understand the context in which he is saying this.
Mr. Author runs with dogs if he thinks is America is the land of the gays. Living on the coasts is a sure fire way to get weird ideas.
I haven't read the book---I'm basing my comments on George Gilder's speech championing the book, and based on that, D'Souza is dead wrong. We could shut down Hollywood tomorrow and these Middle Eastern whackos wouldn't bat an eyelash.
But it should be borne in mind that from the Islamic perspective, Christians are inherently immoral simply by virtue of their – in the Muslim view – exalting Jesus to divine status.
Haven't read D'Souza's book yet, but the above statement has an overwhelming air of condemnation going on in them words.
I simply do not care.
They can suck it up and deal with the fact that the world isn't just precisely the way they like it, like all normal humans above the age of three or so. Or, if they can't, and insist on lashing out in violence, we can kill them.
It's their choice.
That neatly sums up my reaction.
The bottom line: D'Souza is such a craven appeasenik that he makes Chamberlain at Munich look like Leonidas at Thermopylae.
One of the early leaders of the current wave of Islamic Fundamentalist thuggery, one Sayyid Qutb, got a look at "Leave It To Beaver" America in 1948. He was repulsed, horrifed, and determined to incite his co-religionists into a jihad to wipe it out.
So much for Dinesh D'Ummie's silly thesis.
When your standard is set at the low level of someone who blames his own countrymen for the atrocities of foreign terrorists, it's hard to be less patriotic. I suppose that a few people, such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and John Walker Lindh, managed it.
Losers always hate winners. It's part of the mental pathology that makes them losers in the first place.
By your "logic", Mein Kampf is the ultimate distillation of human wisdom.
I hardly think western decadence promotes Islam's mad psychopathic rage. That's just an excuse. Their rage is fueled by the Koran, not external sinners. If everybody else in the world was a saint, they would still be "converting" with the sword.
True conservatives are doing just that. That's why his sad attempts at self-justification have been getting so desperate.
correction:
I had etc.
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