Dinesh D'Souza Blows It

Dinesh D'Souza has written some ground-breaking books in his time, including Illiberal Education (the politics of race and sex on campus) and his 1995 eye-opener, The End of Racism. The latter did more to change my opinions on racial issues than anything I ever read. Before it I viewed racial issues through the same popular mishmash of myth and wishful thinking that most other educated people did.

The Enemy at Home is D'Souza's latest and it does not deserve the same acclaim earned by his earlier efforts. The major reasons for this are these: (1) the book is based on a false premise, i.e. that Muslims hate us because of our immorality and tolerance for gays and (2) the book is mere pandering to those Westerners who hold religious values.

D'Souza would have us believe that it is the immorality of liberals and leftists who have made us the target of Islamic rage. However, one modern Muslim radical, Sayyid Qutb, was a student in Colorado during the late 1940's. Qutb was an Egyptian whose fundamentalist texts are still revered in the Muslim world today. He wrote about how disgusted he was with the immorality of the Americans of that time period, of how men and women freely intermixed in social contexts and even danced, their chests pressing against one another. Obviously, we can't merely go back to the 40's to fulfill D'Souza's fantasy, we must go back even further. How about the 18th Century, the time of Thomas Jefferson, who by the way, owned a copy of the Qur'an.

No, that wouldn't work either. In Jefferson's time the Barbary Pirates (Muslims) were attacking American shipping, robbing ships of goods and kidnapping sailors to press into slavery. Besides, they danced the Minuet in those days, where men and women freely mixed in social situations and even touched hands together.

These facts lead unalterably to one conclusion: D'Souza, you're nuts.

Books like this do far more harm than good, because they deny the reality of Islam's implaccable intolerance of other religions - no matter what their beliefs. There is nothing we can do about this fact, short of adopting Sharia law, putting burqas on our women, and worshipping Allah and Mohammed.