The Orbis

Issue date: 2/20/07 Section: Music and Book Reviews

Dinesh D'Souza

In his latest book, "The Enemy at Home," Dinesh D'Souza makes an incredible claim: he knows what drives the terrorists. All of our perceptions of the Muslim world, he says, are wrong; they have led to our failure in Iraq, and will ultimately lead to failure in the war against Islamic extremists. Liberals and conservatives alike, with their differing interpretations of Sept. 11 and the factors responsible for it, are equally confused about the truth.

In order to explain it all, D'Souza asserts, "The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11."

That may sound like a presumptuous claim to make, but then again, D'Souza is used to stirring up this kind of controversy. A prominent conservative author who defines conservatism as "conserving the principles of the American Revolution," D'Souza once wrote that "black cultural defects" will prevent affirmative action from helping the "dysfunctional" black community (ironically, he made this claim in a book titled "The End of Racism"). His staunch criticisms of feminism, multiculturalism, social welfare programs and political correctness are all well documented. He is also notable for a radical vision of what America should become, and this vision is all too obvious in "The Enemy at Home", in which he goes further than any of his previous books with his criticism American life.

D'Souza's argument is bizarrely inconsistent, but what is more frightening is that he uses it to call for the suppression and reform of most of American society. In order to win the war on terror, D'Souza claims that conservative "Red Americans" must win the culture war at home. And in order to do that, they must push extremely liberal "Blue Americans" out of public view and into the margins of society. To do so would show pious Muslims -- who keep "traditional moral values" -- that the U.S. poses no threat to them. D'Souza firmly believes that this would end terrorist attacks from radical Muslims outraged by the moral depravity of the West.

D'Souza's book begins as a critique of the "fallacies" perpetuated by both the left and the right to explain Sept. 11. These so-called fallacies include the notions that the foreign policy of any Republican president has led to anti-Western sentiment, as well as the notion that terrorists are at all antithetical to the core values of Islam. In fact, D'Souza claims, traditional and pious Muslims do not condemn terrorists because they view them as faithful defenders of Islam. In the early chapters, D'Souza characterizes a vast divide between Red and Blue America. "Ultimately," he writes, "9/11 has exposed a deep chasm in the American soul over the meaning of America itself." Having established this unbridgeable divide between two warring cultures within our own society, he then compares this to the divide separating liberals and traditional Muslims. He concludes that Red America should ally itself with traditional Muslims to fight liberalism.

Continued...

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