D’Souza the shameless

I’ve already quoted the below passage from Dinesh D’Souza’s book, but Hugh Fitzgerald at Jihad Watch just quoted it again, and only this time did the full impact of it hit me:

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.

Take that in: ALL of the murderous intent of Al Qaeda against America, ALL of it, was fueled by the cultural left.

Readers of this site are familiar with what I call the “non-Islam theories of Islamic extremism”: poverty, alienation, racism, Israel, resource depletion, sexual anxiety, cousin marriage, no Kyoto treaty … whatever. But none of the people who have proposed these respective theories, no matter how silly they may be, has ever gone so far as to claim that ALL of the evil intent of Al Qaeda came exclusively from the theorist’s own pet “root cause.” It took an intellectual whore like Dinesh D’Souza to claim that.

Speaking of the non-Islam theories of Islamic extremism, finally someone has gotten it. A commenter at Jihad Watch writes:

This isn’t a left-right thing. It’s the classic mistake people like D’Souza make. He takes whatever bothers him about Western Society and projects it on the terrorists, saying “this is what they hate about us.” A leftist might complain about capitalism, our support of Israel, or our big military while someone like D’Souza complains of excessive sexual freedom or lack of family values (whatever that means) but both sides fail to realize that it’s not about us, it’s about them. They hate us because they want to hate us.

- end of initial entry -

M. Mason writes:

Yes, exactly. The real “explanation” for Islamic extremism is always some false liberal construct of the author’s imagination. It would simply be too backward and racist to say that the beliefs inculcated into Muslims since childhood are the actual reason for it.

Paul Henri writes:

El Stupida was interviewed by El Clown, Mr. Beck, on Headline News tonight. I felt sorry for D’Stupida because Beck cut El Stupida off, as is his technique, which I cannot understand why it is acceptable to Headline News. Beck ridiculed the idea that liberals were responsible for the attacks on America by Islamic warriors. Beck threw in the fact that Reagan did not retaliate after the Beirut bombing of our Marines. In other words, he assumes a single error on the part of Reagan nullifies every conservative argument that the liberal Clinton committed numerous similar errors.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 18, 2007 03:35 PM | Send