Who said this?
“There is no way to restore the culture without winning the war on terror. Conversely, the only way to win the war on terror is to win the culture war. Thus we arrive at a sobering truth. In order to crush the Islamic radicals abroad, we must defeat the enemy at home.”
Ann Coulter? Rush Limbaugh? Bill O’Reilly? Sean Hannity? Nah.
The “sobering truth” in question is that arrived at by our illustrious co-ethnic Dinesh D’Souza, in his new book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, which is to appear in January. Blogger and Vanity Fair writer James Wolcott received a galley copy, and offers an advance review, of which here are some choice bits:
It’s one thing when Michael Savage or Ann Coulter denounce liberals as heathen traitors. One spouts halitosis on the radio, the other is an exhibitionist hag; both cater to their fan base. But D’Souza isn’t some low-grade, high-volume performance artist. He’s a research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, which he thanks in the acknowledgments “for providing me with the institutional support to do my work.” D’Souza writes, speaks, and thinks like something hatched in a think tank—a careerist toady.
The theme of the book is quite simple, and vile.
“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.”
Then the qualifiers begin multiplying. The term ‘cultural left’ doesn’t refer to the Democratic Party, nor to all liberals. (Peter Beinart presumably gets a pass.) Nor is he saying that cultural lefties actually brought the towers down. He isn’t so rash as to suggest Molly Ivins piloted one of the planes, parachuting to safety before impact. So what is he saying?
“I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector [profiteers are always patriots, of course], and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world.”
Note well: the primary cause. Not the treatment of the Palestinians, the caging and starving of those on the Gaza Strip, the hundreds of thousands of clusterbomb droplets left behind in Lebanon, the U.S. military bases on Arab soil, Abu Ghraib, the Mideast tyrannies propped up by American money and influence—these are secondary. Muslims are angry, D’Souza concedes, but they are mostly angry because their anger has been fueled and fanned by the cultural left.
“Thus without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.”
I like that “Thus,” as if he’s actually proven something.
“I realize that this is a strong charge,” D’Souza writes, “one that no one has made before.”
The reason it hasn’t been made before is that it’s a sleazy, shameless, ignorant, ahistorical, tendentious, meretricious lie, one that was waiting for the right brazen liar to come along to promote it, and here he is, and his name is Dinesh D’Souza…
The most excellent evisceration continues at some length, with examples, details, and specific debunkings; check it out. And in the spirit of fairness and balance, you can pre-order your copy of The Enemy Within for $17.79 here.
