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The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, Dinesh D’Souza, Doubleday, 352 pages

Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 is really three separate books jammed together in one package: a persuasive though hardly original account of the Culture War in America; an engaging rendition of the Left’s hostility toward traditional cultures around the world and its attempt to break down the morality undergirding those cultures; and an unconvincing attempt to link the first two books to the third, a defense of the Bush administration’s policies in the Middle East. Because of this odd juxtaposition, there is much of interest in D’Souza’s book, though its parts are definitely greater than the whole.

D’Souza sees America as profoundly divided by cultural issues, views these issues as being of great importance, and fears that conservatives are losing ground to the Left. “[W]hat has changed in America since the 1960s,” he writes, “is the erosion of belief in an external moral order. This is the most important political fact of the past half century.” He provides numerous examples of how this changed view of morality has transformed America, from the debasement of popular culture, to the rapid spread of pornography, to the widespread acceptance of what was universally regarded in the past as sexual immorality, to what D’Souza regards as the inevitable result of such changes: the breakdown of the American family.

He is generally a clear-eyed observer of the Culture War, recognizing that this attempt to redefine morality has produced an America perhaps more divided than at any time since the 1850s. He also realizes that much of what drives the Left is hatred of traditional morality, especially sexual morality: “If there is a villain in the liberal story, it is traditional morality itself.” And, finally, D’Souza recognizes that Middle American consumption of popular culture and acceptance of some of the products of the new morality means that “Liberal values have penetrated the heartland. In this sense liberals are the dominant side in the cultural war.” He is even willing to utter a few unpopular truths, including the observation that art actually flourishes more under mild censorship than in an atmosphere of license. (Anyone who doubts this need only compare the movies of 1939 to those of today.)

D’Souza carries this analysis a step further by showing that the Left has made its struggle against traditional morality a global one, engendering hostility toward America in traditional societies around the world where “the family is not a venue for self-expression, it is the basic unit of survival.” He chronicles how the Left is active in supporting abortion, no-fault divorce, the legalization of prostitution, and “the elimination of the concept of the husband as the head of the household” throughout the world. These efforts, in which liberals have sometimes succeeded in enlisting the aid of the United States government, have provoked resentment toward America. D’Souza provides many examples of this leftist cultural imperialism, including how American delegates to the UN Conference on Women in Beijing attempted to introduce their sisters to the joys of lesbianism, only to have the Third World delegates forcibly expel them from their sleeping quarters. “[T]he left wants America to be a shining beacon of global depravity,” he writes, “a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill.”

He fails, however, to explain adequately how Third World opposition to “a decadent American culture” led to 9/11, still less why those Americans who share his opposition to this decadent culture should support the Bush administration’s Middle East policy. To be sure, D’Souza is right about a number of things that more conventional defenses of the Bush administration are likely to get wrong: he recognizes that Muslims do not “hate us for our freedom”; that Islamic radicalism is not a form of fascism; that we are not at war with terror; that Abu Ghraib horrified the Muslim world because it involved the sexual humiliation of men, not because it violated treaties that are widely ignored when interrogating prisoners in the Middle East. And he expresses at least some skepticism, though hardly enough, about making the forcible export of democracy the centerpiece of American foreign policy. Unfortunately, these lapses into common sense and reality do not redeem D’Souza’s stubborn, ideological defense of the Bush administration.

“The only way to win the war,” D’Souza believes, “is to create a wedge between Islamic radicals and traditional Muslims, and to support traditional Islam against radical Islam.” But he does not produce any evidence that Bush’s invasion of Iraq, rhetorical belligerence toward Iran and Syria, and dismissive dealings with Palestinian leaders of whom Israel disapproves have endeared the U.S. to traditional Muslims. The reality is quite the opposite.

It is undoubtedly true, as D’Souza argues, that the policies advocated by the cultural Left contribute to Muslim resentment of the United States. But positing such cultural decadence as the explanation for terrorism fails to explain why the Islamists did not target more decadent Europe on 9/11 or why subsequent Islamist attacks in Europe have focused on American allies in Iraq. Nor does D’Souza’s exclusive focus on cultural issues explain Muslim hostility toward the Bush administration, which has been sensitive to Islamic religious sensibilities through its pronouncements about the “religion of peace” and more reticent about supporting cultural leftism abroad than was the Clinton administration. Nor is there any reason to believe that America will be able to convince Muslims inclined to radicalism that it is not immoral. D’Souza chronicles the story of Sayyid Qutb, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who was persuaded of the decadence of the United States by prolonged exposure not to contemporary Hollywood but to middle America of the 1940s, when he was a college student in rural Colorado.

And although D’Souza is quick to dismiss what he terms “isolationism” as “foolish,” there is every reason to believe that decreasing the American presence in the Middle East will do more to diminish support for Islamic radicals than his proposed solutions, such as organizing “an international conference on the effects of Hollywood and American popular culture on non-Western cultures.” As D’Souza himself admits, “what bin Laden objected to was America staying in the Middle East, importing with it the immoral ingredients of American values and culture.”

As James Burnham pointed out long ago, America’s only vital interest in the Middle East is oil, a commodity that whoever holds power there will be compelled by economic reality to sell. Given the enmity that we are engendering by our presence, therefore, the question arises: why stay? D’Souza does not provide a convincing answer or explain how our efforts are doing anything other than radicalizing traditional Muslims.

Nor are many likely to be attracted to his vision of Americans fighting and dying to bring sharia to formerly secular states. D’Souza admits that Saddam Hussein “was a secular ruler who kept the mullahs under strict control” and praises Bush for accepting an Iraqi constitution that “gives special place to Islam and includes sharia provisions that treat women unequally than men.” This displacement of a secular tyrant in Iraq has, among other things, caused up to half the members of Iraq’s ancient Christian community to flee the country. D’Souza recognizes that democracy in the Islamic world will lead to the imposition of sharia, and he urges his readers to eschew “ethnocentrism” and accept such a result, even when it is brought about through the expenditure of American blood and treasure.

D’Souza’s fondness for sharia in Iraq is not the only time his pronounced Islamophilia gets the better of him. He takes at face value Islamic claims to be tolerant of Christians and Jews and disparages the cultural achievements of medieval Europe, as compared to those of the Islamic “golden age,” going so far as to exalt “the Koran and an elaborate system of written laws and codes” over Americans’ medieval European forbears who “could not even write their own names.” Indeed, D’Souza seems to have no sense of filial piety toward the continent that gave birth to Western civilization, viewing its current inhabitants as nothing more than enemies in the Culture War and regarding with apparent equanimity—rather then the dismay of any sensible conservative—the prospect of a Europe dotted with minarets.

D’Souza’s Islamophilia also blinds him to the fact that the conflict between Islam and its neighbors originated with Mohammed, not Hollywood. Mohammed began the process of conquest. A Christian West that was far from decadent was the target of Islamic aggression for centuries and survived only because of the valor of Christian warriors in such places as Poitiers, Malta, Lepanto, and Vienna. This Islamic assault on Europe ended only because Turkey was unable to keep pace with European military technology, not because the Ottomans became irenic. In our own age, too, it is only Muslims who react to “a decadent American culture” by resorting to terror. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that no matter what we may have done to make them hate us, tensions on the frontier between the Islamic world and its neighbors are virtually inevitable.

The solution to the problem of radical Islam is not to romanticize Islam, as D’Souza does, by imagining that a shared opposition to such practices as gay marriage can create a genuine community of interest between “traditional Moslems” and Christians for the first time in history. Nor is the answer to invade and democratize the Islamic world, as Bush and the neocons want. Rather, the solution, as Srdja Trifkovic suggests, is to exclude Mecca from America and to disengage America from Mecca, thereby eliminating the greatest threat Islam actually poses—invasion through immigration—and minimizing the tensions and provocations that help Islamic radicalism to spread.

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Tom Piatak writes from Cleveland, Ohio.

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