How could it be that Danish cartoons of Muhammad led to mass violent protests, while unspeakable violence by Muslims against Muslims in Iraq every day evokes about as much reaction in the Arab-Muslim world as the weather report? Where is the Muslim Martin Luther King? [bold mine-DL] Where is the “Million Muslim March” under the banner: “No Shiites, No Sunnis: We are all children of the Prophet Muhammad.” ~Thomas Friedman

There are so many moments when Friedman’s commentary causes pained grimaces or hysterical laughter that it is hard to know if this is the most foolish thing he has ever written.  Why do the Friedmans of the world write columns that pose what should be absurd rhetorical questions as if they were earnest inquiries after truth?  How could it be that the Danish cartoons provoked more outrage?  Well, for starters, the campaign against the cartoons was not spontaneous, it had been organised over the course of many months (adding three additional, far more insulting cartoons to the twelve originals) and the outrage, to the extent that it wasn’t entirely ginned up by demagogues, focused on what these people considered a grave insult to the man they regard as the most virtuous and noble in history.  Plus, it was an occasion to dictate Islamic norms to Westerners in a demonstration of their presumed superiority.  Their view of Muhammad is deeply wrong and their presumption to dictate our behaviour ludicrous, but that is why they responded more vehemently. 

Why would they respond with great outrage about a relative few Sunnis and Shias killing each other?  For both sides, they might respond by saying: what else is new?  In Shia historical memory, Sunnism is identified with the people who caused the death of ‘Ali and with Karbala and the martyrdom of his son, Husayn.  Husayn was literally a direct descendant of Muhammad through his mother, Fatima, and a legal heir through Muhammad’s adopted son.  Down across the centuriessayyids (those who are accepted as descended from Muhammad through the male line) have been typically respected in both sects because everyone acknowledged that not all Muslims were “children of Muhammad.”  Therefore, appealing to Muslims to stop killing one another on the basis of some mythical shared descent from Muhammad (even assuming that those engaged in the violence do not accuse members of the opposing sect through the process of takfir) would be to rub salt in the wound of Shias and uncomfortably remind the Sunnis of Shia claims to authority (which the appeal would probably also effectively endorse).  

Perhaps in his flight of fantasy in which a Muslim MLK gives his “I have a fatwa” speech of reconciliation and brotherhood, Friedman was using children metaphorically.  You have to hope that he was.  Even so, in using this metaphor he accidentally stumbles into one of the long-running causes of opposition between the sects, and thus unknowingly answers his own question about the relative indifference to the violence (since each side will undoubtedly lament its own dead, but not that those killing and being killed are fellow Muslims).  At the same time, he unwittingly invokes the remembered past of suffering and repression that feeds modern Shia attitudes (reinforced by more recent repression at the hands of Sunni authorities) in the unintended allusion to the violent deaths of the first two Imams at the hands of Sunnis.

A separate query: if many Western liberals insist that the Islamic world is in need of an Enlightenment of its own, and these same people consider such an Enlightenment vital to the future moderation of Islam (which assumes, I think erroneously, that Islam’s experience with such a phase would yield results similar to the European Enlightenment with respect to the eventual establishment of religious toleration, pluralism, etc.), and if these same people also believe that our Enlightenment was possible only in the wake of the destruction and disillusionment caused by the “long” century of the Religious Wars (1525-1648), should they not rather cynically welcome Sunni-Shia carnage as their hoped-for vehicle of introducing religious disenchantment into the Islamic world? 

I don’t say that these developments are desirable, nor do I think much of large parts of our Enlightenment (so I would hardly want to inflict such a thing on anyone else), but for the people, like Friedman, who prattle on about liberalisation and reform within Islam and dream of future fantastical Muslim MLKs, it seems to me that they ought to embrace the Muslim-on-Muslim bloodletting, to borrow from our famous “student of history” Secretary Rice, as necessary and the “birth pangs of a new Islamic world.”  That this would reveal the full madness of the drive to “fix” the Islamic world according to our lights, which Westerners will never accomplish, is probably why they hold back from the very logical conclusion of their arguments for liberalisation and reform.  That it would demonstrate the ultimate futility of all attempts at introducing or encouraging reform and liberalising elements would weigh heavily on the minds of the Friedmans, assuming they gave much thought to their false premises.

TOM Cruise is the new “Christ” of Scientology, according to leaders of the cult-like religion.

The Mission: Impossible star has been told he has been “chosen” to spread the word of his faith throughout the world.

And leader David Miscavige believes that in future, Cruise, 44, will be worshipped like Jesus for his work to raise awareness of the religion. ~The Sun

Presumably, the Scientologists will charge people for the privilege of asking for Tom’s forgiveness.  Just when you thought that he couldn’t sink any lower…

Religious zealotry has been responsible for killing more people than any other thing. ~Chuck Hagel

Taken on its own, there are few sillier statements.  If we can attribute the deaths of the French Revolution to liberalism, and I think we can, right there liberalism in France accounts for more deaths in the 18th century than religious conflict throughout the world in the same century.  Liberalism would seem to fare better in the 19th  For every extremely violent and extremely rare T’ai-P’ing Rebellion critics of religion can cite, defenders could point to ideologically-driven state-induced famines caused by collectivisation or nationalist genocides on the other.  For every Thirty Years’ War on one side of the ledger, defenders of religion could invoke the secular and nationalist Thirty Years’ War of 1914-1945.  In sheer numbers, “religious zealotry” at its worst usually cannot compete with the power and passion of revolutionary ideologies.  (The death tolls from the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648 and the T’ai-P’ing Rebellion are as high as they are because of the famine and pestilence that resulted from constant, large-scale campaigning.)  The point is not to cheer on religious zealotry as such, nor is it my purpose to ignore the atrocities of zealots, but rather I am trying to recognise that there are far more destructive and virulent ideas out there that have done and will continue to do more damage.  This is not to dismiss the damage that religious zealotry can do, but to keep in perspective that there are worse things–and things that are responsible for killing more people–than that. 

I am unfortunately reminded here of Dawkins, who rattled off a list of all the violence that would never have happened without religion, all the while failing to notice that most of the killing done throughout history was done for entirely different reasons.  Predictably, Sullivan approves of this bakvas.

Republican Mitt Romney called for economic sanctions against Iran “at least as severe” as those imposed on South Africa during its apartheid era, in an effort to isolate the Central Asian nation and convince it to give up its pursuit of a nuclear weapon.

Addressing a security conference in Israel, the former Massachusetts governor and potential 2008 presidential contender also urged states to divest in Iran, to seek the indictment of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on genocide charges, while also making it clear that pursuing nuclear weapons “can also be a source of peril” for Iran. ~Boston.com (AP)

So, Gov. Romney went to Israel and gave a wild, Santorumesque speech about Iran.  Leave aside the sabre-rattling, the crazy talk about divestment, which will never happen in the countries where there are investors in Iranian firms, and the far-fetched talk of genocide charges against Ahmadinejad.  The sanctions proposal is probably the nuttiest of all in its way, because, even once they are established, they are almost certain not to work.  First, extreme isolation through international sanctions rarely achieves the policy goal that supporters seek, and second it gives the targeted government an immense boost in popularity as the population inevitably rallies around its political leadership in the face of global hostility.  Sanctions and calls for sanctions are classic examples of how governments engage in what are effectively symbolic declarations of displeasure.  These declarations have real-world consequences, almost none of them good for anyone.  In case there was any doubt, Romney has aligned himself with a reckless, confrontational sort of foreign policy that, at first glance, sounds every bit as unhinged and dangerous as anything Mr. Bush has uttered. 

Nothing better aids obedience to the targeted regime and a whipping up of nationalist outrage than the use of heavy-handed tactics to compel a government to change one of its internal policies.  This is even more the case when a broad majority of Iranians believes, correctly, that Iran has the legally-recognised right to develop nuclear energy technology.  You would think experience with Iraq and Yugoslavia sanctions would have taught us that these tactics help shore up governments that are, in fact, much weaker than anyone imagines at the time.  By providing the regime with a foreign threat and the reality of a crisis, sanctions cause dissidents to become silent of their own accord and they cause dissidents to resent the idiotic foreigners who have just made their position impossible.   At the same time, sanctions will tend to inflict terrible costs on the civilian population, whose resulting suffering simply reinforces the view that they should support the policy of their government.  Nothing is more likely to ensure that Tehran proceeds with the development of a nuclear weapon than the use of a blunt instrument like sanctions.  International isolation helps to secure the grip of authoritarian and dictatorial governments.  It plays into the hands of the people whom Gov. Romney most wants to oppose.  This tells me that his foreign policy judgement is extremely poor and that his foreign policy views are informed mainly by the understanding that he needs to appear more belligerent and pro-Israel than the next guy to secure his position in the primaries. 

No doubt his biggest fans think that his irresponsible speech is great.  These are probably also the same people who think that Santorum showed “leadership” by comparing himself to Churchill and warning us about the danger from Venezuela, among other dire threats.  I would ask the Romneyites this: is it your position that such provocative statements about U.S. policy in the Near East should be made by former governors/presidential candidates?  Do you really think that is wise?

The Armenian leadership openly sided with Turkey’s enemies, demanded a state on Ottoman land and formed anti-Ottoman militias. Many Turks were killed by these Armenian groups.

Turkey fears an official apology for the Armenian deaths would trigger claims on its land or on seized Armenian assets. Turks cannot believe the sincerity of foreign parliaments which, usually ill-informed about the Turkish case, give in to Armenian diaspora lobbying for genocide declarations. (One such bill looks likely to pass the U.S. Congress in April.) Politics often seems to trump history. [bold mine-DL] Would the French Parliament have made it a crime last year to deny a “genocide” by the Turks if an unrelated desire to keep Turkey out of the European Union had not been prevalent? ~Hugh Pope

The first statement is a shocking overgeneralisation.  Mr. Pope has evidently written several books on Turkish history, so he ought to know better than to say broad and sweeping things about “the Armenian leadership.”  Much of the flower of Ottoman Armenian political and intellectual leadership in Constantinople (or Konstantiniye as it was still called at the time) was wiped out in the days and weeks following the mass arrests of Armenian journalists, professionals, clergy, scholars and parliamentarians on April 24, 1915 (April 24 is now the day when the genocide is now commemorated).  This leadership had remained quite loyal to the Ottoman Empire, maintaining the Armenians’ reputation as the “loyal” millet in contrast with the Orthodox Christian Slavs and Greeks who had been breaking away from the empire for decades.  For their loyalty, they were rewarded with death, and the deaths of these leading figures gave the signal to the Turkish and Kurdish irregulars in eastern Anatolia to begin the massacres and forced deportation of Armenians from Van, Erzerum and Cilicia, among other locations.  The Young Turk government during WWI coordinated with these irregulars to achieve maximum destruction of the Armenians in Anatolia.  After the Ottoman defeat, there were even some trials of some of those who had participated in the slaughter.  The slaughter was unfortunately not an entirely new thing, since there had been widespread massacres  of Armenians in 1894-96 in the previous generation and no foreign war on which they could later be conveniently blamed.  What was different starting in 1915 was the scale and organisation of the killing and the official backing of the government.   

There were some Armenian nationalists in eastern Anatolia who sided with the Russians in the hopes of establishing an independent Armenian republic (a goal which was briefly realised at war’s end before it was swallowed up by the Soviets and became Armenia SSR), but to refer to these people as “the Armenian leadership” or to treat the problem as if it were one of general subversion of the empire by the entire Armenian community in time of war when it was not the case is unworthy of someone who claims the role of historian.  Indeed, Mr. Pope’s column reads very much like something out of the Turkish government’s own propaganda, including the scare quotes around the word genocide and the outrageous statement that it is somehow the Turkish government that has history, rather than politics, on its side.  It is fairly obvious to most thoughtful people, whether Armenian, Turk or some other nationality, that the massacres did happen and did constitute the first modern genocide.  It has been the political repression of the evidence and speech about this inside Turkey that has been the only real source of doubt about the genocide.  It has been this persistent denial imposed by the Turkish government that has continued to frustrate and embitter the Armenian Diaspora. 

As the late Mr. Dink had tried to argue, preoccupation with Turkish acknowledgement of the genocide has become for many Diasporans a consuming passion, even an unhealthy one.  However, I can hardly blame them for wanting official acknowledgement that this did happen and was a deliberately orchestrated state-sanctioned attempt to annihilate an entire people.  I don’t know why exactly Mr. Pope feels obliged to carry water for Ankara and the argument that “lots of people died–hey, there was a war on!”, especially when the latter is typically the refuge of the Holocaust-denier, but he lends his name to a bad cause and does not do his duty as an historian by lending credibility to the Turkish government’s self-serving justifications of a horrendous crime.  Politics often seems to trump history all right, at least as far as Mr. Pope’s misleading description of the genocide goes.  

For those interested in what a more serious historian has to say about the matter, Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Actis reputed to be an excellent study.  (I regret that I have not yet had a chance to read it, but I plan to do so this year.)  It confirms, as one would expect, that the genocide was “a deliberate, centralized program of state-sponsored extermination.”  This is the work of a Turkish scholar who is keenly aware of the anxieties of Turks about acknowledging this crime, but who is also concerned to tell the truth about these terrible events.  That is the sort of historian we should be heeding.

America faces an existential threat. ~Liz Cheney

From Iraqis?  I think not.  The people who face an “existential threat” in Iraq are Iraqis–and the threat is posed to them by other Iraqis.  War supporters can have it one of two ways: they can harp on the fact that this is a fairly limited, relatively low-casualty war (quick, cite numbers from Shiloh and Iwo Jima!), which implies that the United States are not in grave danger of annihilation from the Jaysh al-Mahdi et al. or they can claim that this is a war for our very existence, in which case their years-long defense of inadequate Bush administration planning and preparation for a war of such magnitude is shown to be something of a fraud.  The administration does not wage this as if it were a war for our very existence, which means that they are either criminally negligent or they are exaggerating the nature of the threat when they and their supporters say these things. 

Will the red, white and black tricolour of Iraqi nationalism be flying over the Capitol in the foreseeable future if we withdraw from Iraq?  Obviously not.  To talk about the Iraq war in terms of an “existential threat” is ludicrous. 

We are fighting the war on terrorism with allies across the globe, leaders such as Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. Brave activists are also standing with us, fighting for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the empowerment of women. They risk their lives every day to defeat the forces of terrorism.

I had thought we were done with this senseless talk about fighting “terrorism.”  “We” do not fight “terrorism,” nor do we fight the “forces of terrorism.”  “We” fight jihadis.  Arguably, if more resources were available for Afghanistan and Waziristan operations, we would be focusing our attention on the real “central front,” to the extent that one can speak of global counterinsurgency in terms of “fronts,” which is anachronistic and tied to conventional warfare of a previous generation.  If we actually had reliable allies in Pakistan, they would have persisted in their campaign against the Pakistani Taliban.  In fact, they had their heads handed to them and have ceased military operations against the Taliban, to which still far too many members of the Pakistani security services and government have remained tied.  In Pakistan we face the same absurd situation that we do in Iraq: we rely heavily on the local government to pursue our goals, not noticing that the local government is deeply compromised by elements of the very enemy forces we are trying to eradicate.  We stake much on the trustworthiness of Musharraf, author of the Kargil War, inveterate enemy of our real ally, India, and perpetual supporter of Kashmiri separatist violence, and on that of Maliki, who has repeatedly shown that his loyalties lie with his master Moqtada.  In short, with “allies” like these we scarcely need enemies.  To recognise the futility of fighting alongside an “ally” like Maliki is not a danger to our broader security interests, but is fundamental to protecting them.  If the alternative to withdrawal is to throw more Americans into the fire of Iraq to make it appear as if we are doing something different, withdrawal is the only sane and decent option as far as American interests are concerned.

But in the liberal mind, to concentrate on the fertility of any one group is to flirt with Nuremberg laws. ~Christopher Hitchens

And in the neocon mind, which is the liberal mind on meth, to focus on the fertility of your own people with natalist policies is to prove your fascism.  Furthermore, it is almost axiomatic in most fascism scholarship that Italian and German pro-natal policies in the interwar period are proof of fascism’s “regressive” and “reactionary” character (because there is the underlying assumption that progressive, civilised, liberal people are not interested in policies aimed at increasing their population).  All of these views are, to put it mildly, very wrong.

Soon, the Christianists will be recruiting ayatollahs to give them back-up in their war on Western freedom. ~Sullivan

Yes, we here in the Christianists Local, No. 38, have a meeting over at the mosque later today.  The agenda?  Sure enough: “How to destroy Western freedom.”  Sullivan sure is sharp. 

Presumably the “Christianists” include Rev. Hagee, who declared the bombing of Lebanon a “miracle of God.”  The ayatollahs–and the Christians and Muslims of Lebanon getting bombed by the “miraculous” IAF–will probably not view kindly this kind of “alliance.”  Herein lies the biggest reason why D’Souza’s idea of such an alliance between conservatives here and Muslims around the world is obviously absurd: almost to a man, the people whom Sullivan loathes and denounces as “Christianists” have an irremediably negative view of Islam, for both religious and political reasons, and would be the last ones to entertain the idiocy of making a pact with Islamic fundamentalists.  These are people who are conservative, to the extent that they are, because they are Christian and because they take Christianity to be the True Faith.  For all the reasons that Sullivan hates these people, almost all could never closely cooperate with Muslims or most other non-Christians to the degree that D’Souza is talking about.  I suspect they would sooner go to a gay discotheque than make such a deal with Muslims, which is one way to say that they would never make such a deal. 

Sullivan writes as if there were a natural unity among all those whom he calls, often erroneously, “fundamentalists,” when it has to be one of the basic traits of any actual fundamentalist to view fundamentalists from another religion as being among the worst people in the world.  Sullivan’s fear of a Christianist-ayatollah connection is the product of what some of us like to call “paranoia,” where the subject believes that contradictory and opposed forces in the world are all working together and out to get him because, under the surface, they are all really on the same side in their loathing of, in this case, the subject’s sexual habits. 

From the perspective of a real believer, for someone to embrace religious error is bad enough, but to embrace it in such a thoroughgoing and intense way strikes the believer as the height of insanity.  In some sense, a Christian believer will assume that the fundamentalists from another religion might often be the “best” representatives of their religion in that they are holding most strictly to their religion’s teachings, and he may even understand that a Hindu or Islamic fundamentalist, let’s say, is only doing what he believes his religious duty mandates.  That does not really excuse what those fundamentalists do–for example, what they do to Christians and Christian churches–but makes their actions the logical outcome of their religion, which further confirms the believer’s negative view of that religion. 

Such a believer might even have some passing respect for the commitment and devotion of such a person, before coming back to reality and realising that religious commitment and devotion are only virtuous if they are aimed at the Good, which false religions are capable of doing only imperfectly.  He will probably take the other religion’s fundamentalists at their word that they represent the pure and true form of their religion, which will only reconfirm in his mind the view that this religion is profoundly wrong.  This is why some Christians, even a few conservative Christians, are willing to cheer on Muslim apostates and “liberal Muslims” who reject both “traditional” and “radical” forms of their religion, even though they would respond in horror if the same sort of anti-traditional and subversive arguments were made by members of their own religion.

According to Dean Barnett, D’Souza states his thesis for The Enemy at Home thus:

I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world.

At first this sounds remotely plausible to a conservative ear.  After all, these same people are responsible for the “volcano of anger” of Middle Americans that is directed at these institutions.  It might stand to reason that Muslims, with their even stricter and more restrictive codes of behaviour, would react even more angrily against these same things.  There is also probably enough truth to it for most people to be willing to hear D’Souza out as he attempts to prove his thesis. 

But why does D’Souza write this book, and why does he write it now?  D’Souza is a well-known flack for the war in Iraq.   In The Enemy at Home, according to Tom’s review, D’Souza attempts to stick an apologia for Bush’s Near East policy into his culture war/alliance with Muslims book.  As Tom notes, the combination doesn’t really work as a single book.  However, the apologia was essential, because I believe that it is to save the reputation of interventionism that D’Souza cooked up this overblown claim about the cultural left’s responsibility for 9/11.  Whatever responsibility for anti-American sentiment the cultural left does bear, it is indeed a huge leap to claim that this lead to 9/11.  9/11 was the hideous work of people who hated America because of the presence of our soldiers in Saudi Arabia and, according to their public claims, our sanctions on Iraq and our support for Israel.  U.S. foreign policy was a major cause of, and in some large degree did provoke, the attacks of 9/11.  Those who support interventionist foreign policy generally and especially those who support its most aggressive, neoconservative form in the invasion of Iraq have a great deal at stake in ensuring that conservatives do not become disillusioned with this failed kind of foreign policy.  It is necessary to distract them with their elemental resentments against cultural liberalism and civilisational decline and, if at all possible, tie in support for the current brand of reckless foreign policy with the defense of our culture and morals.  From what I understand of it, D’Souza’s clunky tripartite book actually seems to be Joseph Bottum’s “new fusionism” in action: a foreign policy guided by “moral” purpose hitched to a cultural conservatism at home.  But this is an expanded “new fusionism” in which intervention in the Islamic world is somehow integrally tied to forming an anti-leftist alliance with Muslims–we are no longer invading other countries simply to topple “evil regimes” but to somehow also counteract the spread of cultural liberalism that allegedly is the real cause of anti-American violence.  It seems likely that the main reason why D’Souza concocts this unwieldy argument in the first place is that the Iraq war is failing and public support even on the right is fading, so, for the sake of the survival of interventionism, it is vital to shift the blame for 9/11 from the interventionism he and others like him support to the broadly acceptable target of the cultural left.  If Barnett’s comments are any guide, the mainstreamers aren’t buying what he’s selling.

When a conservative’s book is lambasted in The New York Times book review section, as Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home was today, I can usually take it for granted that the review, if hostile, will probably be ridiculous and virtually self-refuting.  Alan Wolfe has not disappointed me.  In a review entitled, none too subtly, “None (but Me) Dare Call It Treason,” he excoriates D’Souza’s book as a “national disgrace” and calls the author “childish.”  Tom Piatak had a very different reading of the “disgrace”:

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.  

However, my bad reaction to the NYT review does not mean that I am a great D’Souza fan, and I have already written a little about Tom Piatak’s TAC review of the same book.  My impression of the book has not much improved with the reading of a second review, even though Wolfe’s tone and argument make me want to be sympathetic with D’Souza in spite of myself. 

Let me start by acknowledging that I have not read D’Souza’s book, nor will I be rushing out to buy it.  I am working from what these two reviews tell me.  Based on those reviews, D’Souza seems to say some things that are true (it is true, for example, that Bin Laden has not launched any attacks on Israel and also true that few Americans are terribly distressed at the tens of thousands of dead Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan), but also unfortunately elaborates his “grand strategy” for a sort of international culture war in alliance with “traditional Muslims” that inevitably summons to mind the phrase “ecumenical jihad.”  This is a very, very bad idea, but the proposal itself deserves some consideration so that we can understand fully just how bad of an idea it is. 

Some of D’Souza’s irony is clearly lost on Mr. Wolfe.  For instance, he does not seem to grasp what I take to be the point behind D’Souza’s remark about polygamy and Western sexual freedom.  From Wolfe’s review:

Polygamy exists under Islamic law, but the sexual freedom produced by feminism in this country is, at least for men, “even better than polygamy.”

Perhaps D’Souza is simply being nihilistic here and saying: “They mistreat their women one way, and in certain respects we mistreat them even more in another, so why get on your high horse about their treatment of women?”  On the other hand, he might very well be saying (though why he is saying this, I have no idea, so ripped from context is this excerpt), “A sane society would oppose polygamy on the grounds that it is a disgrace and travesty of the marital bond, which should be a monogamous and faithful union, but we are a deeply sick society that does so much to undermine and wreck the institution of marriage and we mistreat our women in some ways that are more degrading in the name of “sexual freedom,” but still have the gall to attack traditional societies for the practice of polygamy.”  In other words, I think D’Souza probably accepts that polygamy is wrong–I am going to guess that he is not really engaged in cultural relativism here–but recognises that polygamy is relatively better, as a matter of social stability and public morality, than rampant mass fornication dressed up as “freedom.”  Does Mr. Wolfe understand the difference between these two positions?  Does he care about figuring out what D’Souza means?  I assume he does not.  He has the polemical bit between his teeth and he is racing down the track.

Ecumenical jihad is initially, but only very briefly, an appealing concept.  Its core assumption, taken to its logical conclusion, is that a conservative would and should prefer “traditional Muslims” to, say, Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris.  In a global struggle against the cultural leftists, Islam thus supposedly becomes the ally.  This is a sort of Brzezinskian-Reaganite approach to a global cultural conservatism: support the mujahideen against the godless.  The core problem with this idea, besides its complete impracticability, the damage it would do to our civilisation and the scorn with which it would be met on the Muslim side, is that it presupposes a common ground and a consensus on basic moral truths that don’t actually exist. 

Strict conservatives in the West quite rightly have a very dim view of the sexual revolution.  The trouble is that most “traditional Muslims” think, for example, that women appearing in public without accompaniment from a male relative is a form of absolutely unacceptable sexual revolution and indecency and that it can be punishable by violence.  I assume that most conservatives, including many social conservatives, would view this as extreme and excessive.  D’Souza’s alliance rests on the assumption that this is what most of us would like to establish in this country if only we could somehow manage it.  I can believe that many social conservatives want a restored public morality and decency that would impose many, many strictures on people that have since fallen by the wayside without confusing what they want with the codes of Islamic fundamentalists.   

D’Souza’s alliance only makes sense in the very limited, binary analysis of for/against.  “Oh, Muslims are also against homosexuality–let’s join together with them to fight this abomination!”  Except that their idea of the fight is to stone or otherwise execute sexual deviants.  That does almost put them in the Old Testament tradition, or at least the punishment bears close resemblance to Leviticus, but then even the blackest of black reactionaries in the West are unlikely to bring back Levitical punishments that have been in abeyance for centuries and are unlikely to sympathise very much with those still inflicting such punishments.   

As a matter of foreign policy, I am convinced that what Muslims do in their own countries is generally their business, which is why I find D’Souza’s weird combination of Islam and Imperialism so bizarre.  In his view, we should go out of our way to make concessions to traditional Muslim sensibilities all over the place, but then also dictate the political and economic future of their countries through interventionist foreign policy that is sure to anger, humiliate and outrage the very same constituency D’Souza seems intent on satisfying. 

But if D’Souza is incoherent, Wolfe is laughably silly.  Here is Wolfe in high dudgeon:

Unlike President Bush, who once said he could not understand how anyone could hate America, D’Souza knows why Islamic radicals attack us. “Painful though it may be to admit,” he admits, “some of what the critics or even enemies say about America and the West … may be true.” Susan Sontag never said we brought Sept. 11 on ourselves. Dinesh D’Souza does say it.

Leave aside the strange contrast between Mr. Bush’s understanding–which is so widely respected as deep and penetrating!–and D’Souza’s.  This is one of those cases where D’Souza says, “Some of what our critics say may be true” and Wolfe cries, “Anti-American!” faster than a neocon columnist on a deadline.  From the excerpt given here, D’Souza does not say that we brought 9/11 on ourselves.  It says that some of the criticisms of America and the West are not entirely without merit.  That is a perfectly defensible statement, and it happens to be true.  More might be said in this vein, but from what Wolfe tells us D’Souza did not say it.

Another excerpt that proves the book to be a disgrace?  Wolfe recounts:

And the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statement that the West has a taboo against questioning the existence of the Holocaust, while “pooh-poohed by Western commentators,” was “undoubtedly accurate.” 

Here D’Souza has invited trouble for himself by even bringing up Ahmadinejad and failing to engage in a ritual denunciation.  But, according to this excerpt, what did he say was “undoubtedly accurate”?  Ahmadinejad’s claim that there was a taboo against questioning the existence of the Holocaust.  That is “undoubtedly accurate.”  There is a taboo against this.  Wolfe presumably finds D’Souza’s comment about this offensive precisely because there is such a strong taboo that even mentioning that there is a taboo is frowned upon–it’s simply understood and left at that.  Most people in the West happen to think this is a well-founded taboo, since the Holocaust (i.e., the mass killing of Jews in lands under Nazi German authority) did happen. 

One might query (Wolfe does not) why D’Souza mentions this, since Ahmadinejad obviously does not make this observation out of a deep sensitivity about the problems of imposing what are effectively political limitations on historical inquiry.  He uses it as a way to show that there are things “we” in the West consider unquestionable and inviolable and, so he would probably claim, thus our commitment to freedom of speech is a fraud.  However, while I might say that locking people up for making statements about the Holocaust contrary to the generally accepted historical record is stupid and tyrannical, just as I consider the French law outlawing Armenian genocide denial to be foolish and counterproductive (not least since it allows members of the Turkish establishment to pose as some sort of defenders of academic or political freedom, when that is exactly what they are not), Ahmadinejad uses this inconsistency on the part of Westerners to advance the claims of Islam over and against us and to insist that we cannot violate their taboos in what we do because we are supposedly hypocrites when it comes to protecting freedom of speech.  Many European countries are hypocrites about this, but that remains irrelevant.  If Europeans lifted all hate-speech and Holocaust-denial laws tomorrow, Ahmadinejad and other Muslims with him would not change a bit.  D’Souza exposes himself rather stupidly here to the obvious attacks that he had to know would come and doesn’t really make much of point, as far as I can see from this excerpt, except to say, “Ahmadinejad occasionally says things that are factually true.”  This is not very interesting.  It is a sad commentary on the pathetic, super-politicised state of Iran commentary that to say something as mild and inoffensive as this merits special derision from an agent of the Grey Lady. 

D’Souza’s book evidently proposes a fool’s errand of allying with Islam as a path towards the defense of our own culture.  Wolfe does make a couple of the same points I have already made before (e.g., the distinction between traditional and radical Muslims is largely illusory), but largely fails to focus on the central conceptual flaw of D’Souza’s proposal: you cannot drag the Islamic world kicking and screaming towards secular modernity while at the same time hoping that the “traditional” forces within Islam will strengthen or somehow aid in the conservative fight against the cultural left.  This is an idea even more crazy and potentially disastrous than the tired cliche of the fine “family values” of Latin American immigrants who are coming fortify conservatism in America and become loyal GOP voters.  That is why people should throw down D’Souza’s book and move away, and not because he has accused subversives of being just what they are.