Knowing the Enemy: Radical Islam and the Left
by Dinesh D'Souza - February 7, 2007
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
Dinesh D'Souza knows controversy. The author of the bombshells Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (Free Press, 1998), The End of Racism (Free Press, 1996), and What's So Great About America (Penguin, 2003) – as well as a former editor of crisis – he is not afraid to stir things up.
So it is with his newest book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (Doubleday), which is already attracting a good bit of negative attention from the general media. We spoke with D'Souza about contemporary liberalism and its role in Islamic anti-Americanism.
Brian Saint-Paul: You make a fairly dramatic claim in your new book, The Enemy at Home. In it, you argue that the cultural Left is at least partially to blame for the attacks of September 11. Let's start by defining some terms – who is the "cultural Left"?
Dinesh D'Souza: Well, I certainly don't mean the Democratic Party or all Democrats. I'm referring to the left wing of the Democratic Party – and this group itself has a foreign-policy wing and a social or cultural wing.
The foreign-policy types are those who are fighting what you might call the "war against the war on terror." The social and cultural wing includes groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State – in other words, groups that are trying to enhance and justify some of the excesses of our popular culture, as well as those who want to expel religion from the public sphere altogether.
BSP: In your book, while you mention these two groups, you do observe that they are largely the same people.
DD: Yes. This is the Revolving Placard Syndrome. The people who are protesting the war in Iraq are the same people who want to remove the Ten Commandments from public spaces and who march for abortion and homosexual marriage. One week they're in foreign-policy mode and the next they're in the social mode.
BSP: Obviously, you're not a conspiracy theorist. You're not claiming that the Left was actively involved in the 9/11 plot. So how are they partially responsible?
DD: Well, I would say the Left is more than partially responsible. Certainly, the Left didn't commit any of the acts themselves—those were carried out by radical Muslims. But the question you have to ask is, "Did the Left sow the seeds of 9/11?" I think they did, in two ways.
In the foreign-policy domain, radical Islam—which started in the 1920s with the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood—was essentially a marginal phenomenon. It was on the outskirts of Islamic society. But in 1979, it made a major advance by capturing Iran, a crucial Muslim state. Before that, Iran was under the Shah, who was a valuable American ally.
In 1976, Jimmy Carter was elected, and his coterie of left-wing advisers went to Congress and said, "You believe in human rights, and yet we're allied with the Shah, whose secret police violate human rights. We have to pull the Persian rug out from under him and make him abdicate." As a result, the United States pressured the Shah to leave. He did, and we got Khomeini. This was a massive foreign-policy blunder. In getting rid of a bad guy, we got an even worse guy. But most importantly, it was American policy that was complicit in letting radical Islam take control of an important Muslim state.
The second point in the foreign-policy domain is that after the Cold War, many of the radical Muslims who were fighting in Afghanistan went back to their home countries. Bin Laden went back to Saudi Arabia, for example. They were then fighting to overthrow their own governments—what they called the "near enemy."
