Gazizza.Net

Last night, I went to the Constitution Center in Philly to hear Dinesh D'Souza speak on his latest book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. I'd heard about this book a while ago and had not paid much attention to it, figuring I didn't want to read another book in the tit-for-tat battle between the Right and the Left. This was foolish of me because I should have remembered from his earlier works that Dinesh is better than that and not a partisan of the right, although he he is certainly a conservative.

Anyway, I began seeing on the blogosphere comments about how this book was drawing flack from both the Right and the Left. To my mind, that means one of two things: it's complete crap or it's pretty close to the truth. Having read (and enjoyed) D'Souza in the past, I figured it might be worth reading. Then when the opportunity came to see him at the Constitution Center, I figured I should take advantage of it and support that worthy institution.

He makes a convincing case that there are two main causes of the 9/11 attacks: mistakes in American foreign policy and the excesses of American culture. Both were predominately driven by the Left in America.

First, in allowing the overthrow of the Shah, we allowed a bad guy to be replaced by even worse guys and gave Radical Islam a the wealth and power of a state to support its endeavors. Then through the 90s, radical Islam engaged in a series of small attacks on the United States that went largely unresponded to by the Clinton administration (Khobar Towers, USS Cole, the World Trade Center attack, attacks on our embassies, etc.), convincing Bin Laden and his supporters that we were weak despite our apparent strength. This emboldened them to plan and execute the September 11th attacks.

But what drove them to such an anger and hatred towards us? D'Souza argues that it was not our culture itself, but the aggressiveness with which we promote it and try to export it to other more traditional cultures. An example he used was Planned Parenthood, which claims does many good things. (That's certainly not my opinion.) In America, handing out condoms to teenagers is controversial. In other, more traditional societies, it's downright scandalous by near universal agreement. Other pro-abortion organizations are pushing lawsuits in historically Catholic Latin American countries trying to get strong pro-life laws overturned. Traditional cultures see this and react against it. That's why we're the Great Satan, and not Europe despite their being even more decadent than we are. We're the ones aggressively pushing our cultural mores on other nations.

Many in the audience weren't hearing this, it was clear. And it's clear on the Amazon.com comments that many of those commenting on the book haven't read it either. Apparently, these open-minded people can't understand people who don't agree with them. I think the problem comes in with the latent (or overt) hostility many on the Left have to religion. It seemed impossible to some of them that religiously-based beliefs have any validity whatsoever. Regardless of the validity of certain ideas, trying to impose values opposed to what people believe will cause a reaction and that's what we're seeing through much of the world right now: nations with traditional values are seeing America trying to impose our secular values on them and they're not happy about it.

D'Souza argues that we can't win the "War on Terror" without resolving the Culture War. He stated agreement with many things that I personally disagree with. (He opposes strict pro-life laws for example.) He argues that we need traditional Muslims on our side in our battle with Radical Islam, if we want to have a prayer of winning, but when traditional Muslims see our aggressively amoral culture spreading, they begin to think sharia's not such a bad thing. So he suggests that we don't have to change things here necessarily, but just stop imposing our values on other societies that don't want them. That would give us a better chance of isolating the Radicals who oppose us.

Ironically (to me, at least), we need to get liberals to show cultural sensitivity even though they're the ones usually making that cry. We need to stop the cry of "an abortion in every womb, and a condom in every pocket" before we drive even more potential allies to the side of our enemies.

I haven't read this book yet, but I'm definitely looking forward to it. He claims to spend about half the book on foreign policy, but last night's discussion was largely based on social issues since that's where the moderator and questions focused. It should be a good read.