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Summary
From THE ENEMY AT HOME:
"In this book I make a claim that will seem startling at the outset. The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11. … In faulting the cultural left, I am not making the absurd accusation that this group blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. 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. The Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks were the product of this visceral rage--some of it based on legitimate concerns, some of it based on wrongful prejudice, but all of it fueled and encouraged by the cultural left. Thus without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.
"I realize that this is a strong charge, one that no one has made before. But it is a neglected aspect of the 9/11 debate, and it is critical to understanding the current controversy over the 'war against terrorism.' … I intend to show that the left has actively fostered the intense hatred of America that has led to numerous attacks such as 9/11. If I am right, then no war against terrorism can be effectively fought using the left-wing premises that are now accepted doctrine among mainstream liberals and Democrats."
Whenever Muslims charge that the war on terror is really a war against Islam, Americans hasten to assure them they are wrong. Yet as Dinesh D'Souza argues in this powerful and timely polemic, there really is a war against Islam. Only this war is not being waged by Christian conservatives bent on a moral crusade to impose democracy abroad but by the American cultural left, which for years has been vigorously exporting its domestic war against religion and traditional morality to the rest of the world.
D'Souza contends that the cultural left is responsible for 9/11 in two ways: by fostering a decadent and depraved American culture that angers and repulses other societies--especially traditional and religious ones-- and by promoting, at home and abroad, an anti-American attitude that blames America for all the problems of the world.
Islamic anti-Americanism is not merely a reaction to U.S. foreign policy but is also rooted in a revulsion against what Muslims perceive to be the atheism and moral depravity of American popular culture. Muslims and other traditional people around the world allege that secular American values are being imposed on their societies and that these values undermine religious belief, weaken the traditional family, and corrupt the innocence of children. But it is not "America" that is doing this to them, it is the American cultural left. What traditional societies consider repulsive and immoral, the cultural left considers progressive and liberating.
Taking issue with those on the right who speak of a "clash of civilizations," D'Souza argues that the war on terror is really a war for the hearts and minds of traditional Muslims--and traditional peoples everywhere. The only way to win the struggle with radical Islam is to convince traditional Muslims that America is on their side.
We are accustomed to thinking of the war on terror and the culture war as two distinct and separate struggles. D'Souza shows that they are really one and the same. Conservatives must recognize that the left is now allied with the Islamic radicals in a combined effort to defeat Bush's war on terror. A whole new strategy is therefore needed to fight both wars. "In order to defeat the Islamic radicals abroad," D'Souza writes, "we must defeat the enemy at home."
Author Notes
Dinesh D'Souza was born on April 25, 1961 in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. He came to the U.S. in 1978 and attended Union High School in Patagonia, Arizona. He went on to Dartmouth College, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in English in 1983. While attending Dartmouth, he became the editor of a conservative monthly called The Prospect. The paper ignited controversy during D'Souza's editorship by criticizing the College's affirmative action policies. He also became known as a writer for the Dartmouth Review which was subsidized by several right-wing organizations. After Dartmouth he moved to Washington, D.C. where he was an editor of Policy Review, an influential conservative journal. In 1988 he left the magazine on to serve as an advisor in Ronald Regan's White House. He joined the American Enterprise Institute in 1989 where he was the institute's John M. Olin fellow. He has appeared on several news shows as a political commentator such as: CNN, Glen Beck, and ABC's Nightline.
D'Souza's first book, Lliberal Education was published in 1991. Since then, he has written numerous bestselling political commentaries, including: America: Imagine a World Without Her, Obama's America: Unmaking the American Dream, Letters to a Young Conservative, The End of Racism, and The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left.
D'Souza's title's, Hilary's America and Death of a Nation, made the New York Times Bestseller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Conservative pundit D'Souza (Illiberal Education) roots the blame for the 9/11 attacks in the left wing's "aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family" in this mostly lucid but unconvincing argument. Pointing to Hillary Clinton, Britney Spears and Noam Chomsky, he decries those who have teamed up with Hollywood and the U.N. to foist an irreligious, sexually licentious, antifamily liberal culture-epitomized by Eve Ensler's play The Vagina Monologues and gay marriage initiatives-on a Muslim world that rightly reviles it. By deliberately attacking Islamic values, the left tacitly allies itself with al- Qaeda in its effort to defeat Bush's war on terror and thus discredit conservatism at home, he asserts. But D'Souza's claim that Islamic extremists are inflamed solely by America's music videos and feminists-not its U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or American support for Muslim dictators-is too single-minded. For example, he paints Abu Ghraib poster-girl Lynndie England as the personification of liberal sexual depravity, without acknowledging that the U.S. Army sent her to Iraq, not the left. Charging that liberals aid terrorists while sympathizing with the terrorists' culturally conservative worldview, D'Souza's critique of American cultural excess trips over its own inconsistencies. (Jan. 16) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
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New York Review of Books Review
None (But Me) Dare Call It Treason America will be safe, Dinesh D'Souza claims, if only we get rid of all the leftists. AT first Dinesh D'Souza considered him "a dark-eyed fanatic, a gun-toting extremist, a monster who laughs at the deaths of 3,000 innocent civilians." But once he learned how Osama bin Laden was viewed in the Muslim world, D'Souza changed his mind. Now he finds bin Laden to be "a quiet, well-mannered, thoughtful, eloquent and deeply religious person." Despite being considered a friend of the Palestinians, he "has not launched a single attack against Israel." We denounce him as a terrorist, but he uses "a different compass to assess America than Americans use to assess him." Bin Laden killed only 3,000 of us, with "every victim counted, every death mourned, every victim's family generously compensated." But look what we did in return: many thousands of Muslims dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, "and few Americans seem distressed over these numbers." I never thought a book by D'Souza, the aging enfant terrible of American conservatism, would, like the Stalinist apologetics of the popular front period, contain such a soft spot for radical evil. But in "The Enemy at Home," D'Souza's cultural relativism hardly stops with bin Laden. He finds Ayatollah Khomeini still to be "highly regarded for his modest demeanor, frugal lifestyle and soft-spoken manner." Islamic punishment tends to be harsh - flogging adulterers and that sort of thing - but this, D'Souza says "with only a hint of irony," simply puts Muslims "in the Old Testament tradition." Polygamy exists under Islamic law, but the sexual freedom produced by feminism in this country is, at least for men, "even better than polygamy." 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." 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. Dreadful things happened to America on that day, but, truth be told, D'Souza is not all that upset by them. America is fighting two wars simultaneously, he argues, a war against terror abroad and a culture war at home. We should be using the former, less important, one to fight the latter, really crucial, one. The way to do so is to encourage a split between "radical" Muslims like bin Laden, who engage in jihad, and "traditional" Muslims who are conservative in their political views and deeply devout in their religious practices; understanding the radical Muslims, even being sympathetic to some of their complaints, is the best way to win the support of the traditionalists. We should stand with conservative Muslims in protest against the publication of the Danish cartoons that depicted the Prophet Muhammad rather than rallying to the liberal ideal of free speech. We should drop our alliance with decadent Europe and "should openly ally" with "governments that reflect Muslim interests, not ... Israeli interests." And, most important of all, conservative religious believers in America should join forces with conservative religious believers in the Islamic world to combat their common enemy: the cultural left. The "domestic insurgents" who, in D'Souza's view, constitute the cultural left want "America to be a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill." "I intend to name the enemy at home," D'Souza proclaims, and so he does. Twenty recent members of Congress, including Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ted Kennedy, are on one of his lists, and 17 intellectuals (one dead, one British) are on another, with similar numbers of Hollywood figures, activists, foreign policy experts, cultural leaders and organizations. Some of those he identifies - Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, Ward Churchill - might not be surprised to find themselves here. Others - the sociologist Paul Starr, the historian Sean Wilentz, the clergyman Jim Wallis, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum - are less obvious candidates for inclusion. (One person, Thomas Frank, is mentioned on two different lists.) All these people might charge D'Souza with "McCarthyism" for supposedly exposing them, but he accepts the challenge. McCarthy, after all, was "largely right." Lest one think that D'Souza exaggerates the danger the cultural left presents to America, he has an ace in the hole to back him up: Osama bin Laden himself. Bin Laden, it seems, has taken pains to identify his natural allies within the United States and regularly engages in "signaling" them through videotapes in "an effort to establish a broader political alliance." In particular, his fall 2004 tape, generally believed to have helped George W. Bush defeat John F. Kerry, contained a secret message to the cultural left that D'Souza, and D'Souza alone, has decoded. "Whichever state does not encroach upon our security thereby ensures its own," bin Laden declared. Anyone who thinks bin Laden used the term "state" to mean "country" - common usage in Europe and the Middle East - is wrong. He was actually telling residents of New York and Massachusetts that if they voted for the Democrats, he would refrain from killing them. D'Souza writes like a lover spurned; despite all his efforts to reach out to bin Laden, the man insists on joining forces with the Satanists. D'Souza has fallen on hard times lately. Political correctness and affirmative action - the issues he has addressed in inflammatory ways in the past - no longer inspire the same passion. "The Enemy at Home" is clearly designed to restore his reputation as the man who will say anything to call attention to his views; charging prominent senators and presidential candidates with treason can do that (One can dismiss D'Souza's claim that "I am not accusing anyone of treason or even of anti-Americanism" as either self-delusional or dishonest; my guess is the former.) Yet despite all his heated rhetoric, D'Souza's book is unlikely to make much of a dent. It relies on a distinction between traditional and radical Islam that even he does not take seriously; there are no theological differences between the two camps, he suggests at one point, and even the "few" political differences between them are disappearing. It is filled with factual errors (Milton Himmelfarb, not Irving Kristol, compared the voting behavior of Jews to that of Puerto Ricans; Diana Eck is not a historian, but Thomas Frank, wrongly identified as a political scientist, is). In a line D'Souza will surely wish he had never written, he brags of the "remarkable progress" in Iraq "since Hussein's removal from power." Some of the people he elevates to the status of major enemies of the United States - Kristine Holmgren, Robert Jensen, Glenda Gilmore - are (no offense intended) anything but household names. At one point in "The Enemy at Home," D'Souza appeals to "decent liberals and Democrats" to join him in rejecting the American left. Although he does not name me as one of them, I sense he is appealing to people like me because I write for The New Republic, a liberal magazine that distances itself from leftism. So let this "decent" liberal make perfectly clear how thoroughly indecent Dinesh D'Souza is. Like his hero Joe McCarthy, he has no sense of shame. He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible. People on the left, especially those who have been subjects of D'Souza's previous books, will shrug their shoulders at his latest screed. I look forward to the reaction from decent conservatives and Republicans who will, if they have any sense of honor, distance themselves, quickly and cleanly, from the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The aging enfant terrible of American conservatism seems to have a soft spot for Osama bin Laden. Alan Wolfe teaches political science at Boston College and is the author of "Does American Democracy Still Work?"
Kirkus Review
"In order to crush the Islamic radicals abroad, we must defeat the enemy at home." Wasn't it Jerry Falwell who proclaimed that the gays and lefties were responsible for the terrorist events of 9/11, God having vented righteous wrath against the decadent? Rightist ideologue-for-hire D'Souza (Letters to a Young Conservative, 2002, etc.), a denizen of the ivory-tower Hoover Institution, picks up where Falwell left off, and though he takes pains to distance himself from the Falwellian message, as did so many other Republicans in public, he unswervingly voices the master's themes. The "cultural left" is responsible for fostering decadence--after all, doesn't it protect pornography under the disguise of free speech and get all worked up about naked abuses of imperial power? Decadent liberal culture "angers and repulses traditional societies" such as might be found in Saudi Arabia and Dallas. By questioning the Bush administration, which has America's best interests at heart, the lefties are egging on bin Laden and company, which amounts to treason. D'Souza helpfully provides an enemies list, numbering such figures as Nancy Pelosi and Bill Moyers and of course Michael Moore, who are of course more dangerous than anything al-Qaeda might field. But to get to that list, the careful reader will have waded through a curious defense of Wahhabism (it's just Islamic conservatism), witnessed D'Souza's brave scolding of the Bush administration (it's bad to try to democratize the Middle East, since the unwashed might well vote for Osama and Saddam), seen that Planned Parenthood is the source of much evil in the modern world inasmuch as it scorns "efforts to teach sexual modesty and 'abstinence' to young people" and understood that the Islamists are just upset by America's "missionary paganism" as part of the liberals' plot to undermine God. "We know who the domestic insurgents are," D'Souza warns, trying to sound ominous, "and we know who is sheltering and supporting them." Yes, indeed. Hillary, meet Hussein, whose collective fault it all is. As for the rest of the liberals, well, chadors and hellfire await. Ridiculous red-baiting, intellectually on the Coulter--not the Buckley--plane. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Why do Muslim countries and indeed other traditional societies hate the West? They're put off by the permissive views espoused by liberals, argues the author of Illiberal Education. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
ONE Illusions on the Right What Conservatives " Know " About 9/11, and Why It ' s Wrong THE REASON AMERICA'S "war on terrorism" is imperiled is that there is no clear sense of who the enemy is. Is Al Qaeda the problem? A network of terrorist groups operating through the Al Qaeda "franchise"? State-sponsored terrorism? Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of hostile states? Or is Islamic fundamentalism to blame, since it appears to be the incubator of terrorism? Or is the West facing a very old enemy, Islam itself? Not only is the identity of the enemy obscure; many Americans also have no idea why these people are so murderously hostile to the United States. Five years after 9/11, most people still have little sense of what would cause a bunch of men to want to blow themselves up in order to smash the Pentagon and topple the World Trade Center. The 9/11 Commission Report , for all its length and lucidity, only describes how the grisly event occurred but gives no coherent explanation for why it occurred. Americans--including the U.S. government--also seem confused about what is the overall objective of the enemy. Terror for its own sake? U.S. troops out of Mecca? The destruction of the state of Israel? Islamic control of the Middle East? World domination? Moreover, since the enemy's goals are unknown, it is virtually impossible to figure out its strategy; about all that seems known is that terrorism is one of its components. Without reliable knowledge of what the enemy wants and how it intends to achieve its goal, it seems virtually impossible to have an effective counterstrategy, either at home or abroad. In addition, America's people and leaders are deeply divided about whether this is a war with an end point, over what would constitute "success," and over whether success is even possible in this new kind of war. No nation ever won a war under these conditions. Therefore, the crisis of the war against terrorism is primarily an intellectual crisis, a crisis of understanding. To fight this war better it is necessary to understand it better. Therefore let us return to the beginning, to the cataclysmic attack that launched this new war for a new century. Approximately five years after 9/11, we know a great deal about that nightmarish event. Many Americans actually saw it happen. If you were watching television the morning of September 11, 2001, you would have had your programming interrupted shortly before 9 a.m. That's when the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Word spread rapidly, and millions of Americans were riveted to their TV sets when, a few minutes later, a second plane flew directly into the South Tower. The sight of the slow-motion collapse of these two landmarks of the New York skyline, with chaos everywhere and people running for their lives, will long remain etched on the national psyche. One of the most gruesome symbols of 9/11 was the sight of people jumping out of windows, preferring to fall to their deaths rather than be roasted alive in the fiery inferno. Soon Americans discovered that a third plane had slammed into the northwest side of the Pentagon, and a fourth, headed for an unknown destination, had crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. As the magnitude of the disaster slowly registered, Americans saw heroic scenes of firefighters trying to rescue survivors, and poignant portraits of desperate New Yorkers trying to locate family members, hanging on to the slender hope that they had made it out of the burning buildings alive. Here is a typical plea, taken from a collection of recordings from the 9/11 archive: "If anyone has any idea, or if they've seen him or know where he is, call us. He's got two little babies. Two little babies." It was the worst day in American history, worse than Pearl Harbor, worse even than Gettysburg. Those were military catastrophes, one of them off American shores, in which soldiers killed soldiers. By contrast, 9/11 was an attack on the American mainland; it was an attack on the core institutions of America, and it took nearly three thousand lives, the vast majority of them civilians. The Cold War lasted for decades, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and confronted Americans with the prospect of nuclear annihilation, but fewer Americans were killed over the entire duration of the Cold War than perished on a single day in September 2001. What made 9/11 even more sobering was the recognition that its perpetrators intended to blow up the White House or the Capitol--the apparent destination of the fourth plane--and they meant to kill a lot more people. Nearly fifty thousand people worked in the World Trade Center, and the death toll from 9/11 could have been much higher. Today, with the perspective of hindsight, and thanks to the detailed government investigation that culminated in The 9/11 Commission Report , we have a lot of information about 9/11. We know a great deal about what happened and how it happened. We know that the original plan, proposed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, called for the hijacking of ten planes to be crashed into targets on both coasts. (1) (Bin Laden settled for the final plan that was executed on September 11.) We can follow the movements of the terrorists in the period leading up to 9/11. We have a detailed account of what they did that day: where and when they boarded the planes, when they spoke to one another, what they carried with them, and what they left behind in their rooms. The report has a moment-by-moment description of the climactic denouement. We can read heartbreaking transcripts of passengers calling family members to say "I love you," and, "Good-bye." We can hear what flight attendant Madeline Sweeney said as she saw American Airlines flight 11 zoom over the Hudson River toward the World Trade Center. "I see water and buildings," Sweeney told her ground supervisor. "Oh my God, oh my God!" What The 9/11 Commission Report does not tell us, however, is why it happened. (2) On the subject of why the terrorists and their sponsors did what they did, the report is largely silent. This failure to comprehend the motives and goals of the enemy greatly limits the value of the report. Moreover, the report's discussion of the vital question of whether 9/11 could have been prevented suffers from an air of unreality. The report concludes that 9/11 could have been averted had America done this and that and the other--if only America had better control of its borders, if only the agencies of government were restructured to permit better sharing of intelligence, if only there were more systematic checks on airlines and other modes of transportation, and if only America had eliminated the Al Qaeda training camps and their support structures. This conclusion is a fallacy. Call it the fallacy of retroactive insight. The characteristic feature of 9/11 was that it was a surprise attack designed to take advantage of an existing vulnerability in America's defenses. After the attack, it is easy to say that we should have taken the measures that would have prevented the attack. But imagine the uproar if a newly elected President Bush had ordered massive air strikes on Afghanistan prior to September 11. Imagine if someone, prior to 9/11, proposed restructuring the government at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, restricting the freedom and convenience of Americans through extensive security checks and measures like the Patriot Act, and ousting the Taliban through military force. Such a person would have been dismissed as a paranoid and a crackpot, akin to someone today who called for America to take drastic measures to stop the Chinese from invading Florida. In this sense, I do not believe 9/11 could have been prevented. BUT WHY DID they do it? The terrorists didn't leave an explanatory note, and the question of their motives has haunted America ever since the fateful attacks. At first 9/11 generated a spectacular moment of national unity, in which Americans came together to grieve over the terrible loss of life, acknowledge a new sense of shared vulnerability, and cherish the heroism of the police officers and firefighters. From the far ends of the world came words of sympathy and solidarity. Even the French commiserated, and Le Monde ran a banner headline proclaiming, "We are all Americans." At the same time, however, Americans were startled by the reaction to 9/11 from certain quarters of the Muslim world. "Allah has answered our prayers" declared the Palestinian weekly Al-Risala in its September 13, 2001, issue. The Egyptian newspaper Al-Maydan noted that when the news broke that the towers were hit, "Millions of us shouted in joy." There were celebrations in Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan, and Jordan. Even in London, some Muslims rejoiced and Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed preached a sermon in his mosque calling September 11 "a towering day in history" and hailing the "magnificent 19" for what they did. (3) In many parts of the Muslim world, Osama bin Laden became an instant sensation for having hit America where it hurt. Americans who hoped that these reactions were grotesquely aberrant, and expected them to be strongly repudiated by the rest of the Muslim world, found these hopes disappointed. Wracked with grief over 9/11, and furious at this bloody assault on civilian life, American leaders and opinion makers responded with instinctive and sputtering contempt toward their attackers. Several TV commentators and talk radio hosts proclaimed the 9/11 attackers "insane." Columnist Thomas Friedman declared that Osama bin Laden was simply "a psychopath." Another theory was that 9/11 was pointless, what scholar-activist Edward Said termed "a terror mission without message, senseless destruction." Historian Stanley Hoffman, not previously known for his expertise in Koranic interpretation, noted that the bin Laden crew were acting "on so peculiar an interpretation of the Koran that there is very little one can do to rebut it." President Bush took up this theme on September 20, 2001, charging that the 9/11 attackers "blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself." Columnist Barbara Ehrenreich suggested that 9/11 was an uprising on the part of the wretched of the earth, seeking to remedy "the vast global inequalities in which terrorism is ultimately rooted." Writing in The New Yorker , Hendrik Hertzberg and David Remnick announced, "This is a conflict that pits all of civilized society against a comparatively small, essentially stateless band of murderous outlaws." (4) It is easy to sneer, with the benefit of hindsight, at these outlandish theories. But there was a good deal of evidence even at the time they were uttered that they were wrong. Clearly the terrorists were not insane, or they could never have pulled off the most successful terrorist attack in history. By all accounts 9/11 required a degree of imagination, precision, and coordination of which insane people simply are not capable. At the meager cost of $500,000, and armed only with box cutters, the 9/11 hijackers managed to inflict heavy casualties, cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage, and transform the way of life of the world's most powerful nation. (5) Since bin Laden was one of the richest men in the world, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri a physician from one of the most prominent families in Egypt, and most of the 9/11 hijackers from educated middle-class backgrounds, 9/11 was hardly a poor man's uprising; one might almost call it "terrorism of the rich." By all accounts bin Laden and Zawahiri are deeply pious Muslims, and the diaries left behind by the 9/11 hijackers show them to be equally sincere and devout. (6) There are many people in the Muslim world who disagree with bin Laden and the perpetrators of 9/11, but few Muslim clergy consider them to be apostates or betrayers of Islam. Moreover, it was clear from the beginning that lots of Muslims supported and rejoiced in 9/11, and that far from being stateless outlaws, bin Laden and his men enjoyed the sponsorship and support of at least one Islamic regime, the Taliban government of Afghanistan. These errors are not surprising. The mood in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was disturbed and intemperate. Many Americans expressed the view that they didn't care why America was hated; they just wanted to find the people who planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks, and to obliterate them. No wonder that many senseless things were said in this truculent frame of mind. What is surprising is that for a time there was moral and ideological unity in America of a kind not seen since World War II. Suddenly the old divisions in America--over race, over taxes, over the Clinton legacy, over the 2000 election and the Supreme Court decision that put Bush in office--evaporated. The whole nation felt itself under attack by a common enemy. One powerful symbol of this unity was the sight of the entire U.S. Congress, conservative Republicans joined by liberal Democrats, singing "God Bless America" in front of the nation's Capitol. Despite their previous disagreements, the Democrats in Congress pledged to support President Bush in a unified national response to 9/11. Even old ideological adversaries began to speak the same political language. A few days after the attacks, the New York Times declared that bin Laden and the hijackers "acted out of hatred for the values cherished in the West such as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism, and universal suffrage." (7) I am not concerned at this point with the veracity of the Times's statement. I am struck, however, that a major newspaper that can be relied on to condemn President Bush here sounded exactly like him. Thus 9/11 produced something that Americans once took for granted but now experienced as a novelty. One America. One America united against its enemies. But this moment of national unity was brief. It lasted as long as the impact of 9/11 was fresh. But as soon as that emotional wound began to heal, the moral and ideological unity disappeared and a furious debate broke out over the meaning of 9/11. This debate has only intensified the division in the country, revealing the division to be bigger than 9/11, bigger even than foreign policy. Ultimately 9/11 has exposed a deep chasm in the American soul over the meaning of America itself. I WANT TO begin by discussing the mainstream conservative view of 9/11 that formed the basis for the Bush administration's war against terrorism. This view is sometimes called the "neoconservative" approach, although I believe it is wrongly labeled as such. Some neoconservative strategists may have helped to devise it, but ultimately it is President Bush who adopted it and it is the Bush position that enjoys general support on the right and in the Republican Party. I recognize of course that there are dissident factions on the right, primarily the Buchanan wing of the "old right" and the libertarian critics. I will address their views later. Here I outline the central principles of Bush's conservative understanding of 9/11. Excerpted from The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility For 9/11 by Dinesh D'Souza All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
