Shortly after the controversy erupted over my book The Enemy at Home, with not only liberals but even some conservatives having epileptic fits, I got an email from a man I was glad to hear from. Not that I was feeling discouraged at the time. True, this is my first book to draw fire from the right, but I have not exactly been intimidated by the lectures I am getting on Islamic theologiy and practice from people like Roger Kimball (editor of a literary magazine), Victor Hanson (an expert on ancient Greece) and Scott Johnson (a lawyer who blogs in his spare time). My substantive criticism of these weekend students of Islam will be out soon, and it will be worth the wait.Note the sneering and ad hominem, which, as it turns out, springs from actual or wilful ignorance on D'Souza's part. Roger Kimball is dismissed as the "editor of a literary magazine." (Can you detect the implied word "mere" in there?) Kimball has displayed plenty of ego during his years running "New Criterion." But he has also been one of the rare critics (Wonker is the other one, writing under his real name in a well-known publication, and maybe Terry Teachout as well) to wage the culture wars on behalf of a party that still can't acknowledge their importance. D'Souza's asinine remark is meant to dismiss Kimball as a lightweight. But Kimball's extensive body of work can't be so pertly dismissed by someone half his age and boasting considerably less experience.
Dinesh next disses Victor Davis Hanson as "an expert on ancient Greece." This is either wilfull ignorance or adolescent churlishness—who knows which? Hanson is widely read, widely published, and an expert on military history from the dawn of time to the present era. He is readable, scholarly, and extraordinarily well informed on more topics than D'Souza can count. He is not merely "an expert on ancient Greece," with the implication that he knows nothing about the present. Such dismissiveness on D'Souza's part simply enhances the arguments of those who doubt the depth of his own scholarly commitment.
And finally, Dinesh dumps on Power Line's Scott Johnson, "a lawyer who blogs in his spare time." First of all, if D'Souza really means this, we are witnessing a truly breathtaking display of ignorance on his part. Pretty much ALL bloggers, including this one, blog in their spare time. That's why the best ones, like Scott Johnson, Esq., write better blogs than veterans of the MSM write columns. Living in the real world, bloggers like Johnson are far better informed on a wider range of topics than someone like D'Souza who makes a leisurely living drawing money from Stanford's conservative Hoover Institute think tank. Mind, we wouldn't object to getting a few bucks from the Hoover ourselves, and we don't begrudge Dinesh the quasi-scholarly living he earns from these folks. But to make the assumption D'Souza makes, namely, that your scholarship can only be good scholarship if you're an academic is precisely the same argument that's been made for years by the legions of tenured frauds who populate the academic left.
Once upon a time, no one could make a living from writing, let alone scholarship. So a great many writers in history have composed great books on the side, notably a statesman and bureaucrat named Geoffrey Chaucer.
Further, were Dinesh to toss this kind of snottiness at a practiced attorney like Scott, he would be eviscerated in short order. Scott is apparently ready to do just that.
D'Souza is rapidly using up the good will and capital he generated by writing better books early in his career. Like Michael Lind, who first turned on his patrons on the right and eventually dissipated any goodwill he might have had by writing a series of terribly researched books attacked on both sides of the Atlantic, D'Souza is in jeopardy of sinking his already leaking ship. Lind soon learned that if you've started out on the right, even if you turn left, the left will never embrace you or trust you. Turncoat David Brock discovered this as well. Burning your bridges on both ends is rarely a successful strategy.
D'Souza has to date shown no signs of pulling a Lind or a Brock. But at the end of the day, forced for over half a century to defend itself against expert propagandists and cheap-shot artists of the left, conservative writers and readers demand better scholarship and a much higher level of proof from their writers and pundits, unlike those on the left who'll give any writer a pass for sloppy scholarship so long as it includes a snotty attack on Bush or Cheney. D'Souza needs to grow up and mend his fences before he digs a hole for himself that he can't climb out of.
As we stated in our earlier post, referring to D'Souza's assertion that the asininity of the American left "caused" Islamofascism, an edited version of which we'll insert here:
D'Souza is precisely wrong in his thesis. The fundamental nature of his error is as astounding as it is destructive. In point of fact, liberalism, Western decadence, including the West's flaccid social norms and wilful ignorance of its own Judaeo-Christian cultural roots, are and have been a convenient excuse for the Islamofascists to wage continuous jihad against the "infidel."What I wrote in January still holds true today. It's time for D'Souza to eat a little humble pie and mend fences with folks who've been fighting the battles longer than Dinesh has been on this planet. He needs to understand that cat-fighting with people who should be his allies on the right will score no points with the left. Additionally, it should be clear to him by now that few if any people on the left will buy his book. If he continues to piss on conservatives, they won't buy it either. And that's no way for a writer or a scholar to make a living.
The constant denunciation of Western decadence and the West's alleged oppression of the third-world masses is the cloak behind which Al Qaeda and its fellow ideologues hide, much as Industrial Revolution-style capitalism served as the smokescreen obscuring the true intentions of mass-murdering communists like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.
Which brings us back to D'Souza's fundamental and very damaging error. He is quite simply confusing an outward symptom of Islamofascism, its alleged grievance against Western (liberal) culture with the disease itself which is unbridled, murderous fury against a world the Islamofascists cannot control. It is a tribute to the effectiveness of Islamofascist propaganda that D'Souza should fall into this trap. But, given the amount of time he's had to research this issue, let alone the monetary support he's obviously received, one wonders how such a genuinely bright conservative light could have failed so completely to grasp the obvious.
What conservatives have failed to grasp, are failing to grasp, and seem determined to continue to fail to grasp is the left's true "guilt" for 9/11. The left did not cause 9/11, as D'Souza theorizes. That point of view is simply asinine. What the left actually accomplished is far more insidious. By weakening our educational system and the objectivity of our courts over the past half century; by transforming the goal of civil rights and equality for all into institutionalized, race-based class struggle; by dominating nearly every outlet for information and by turning most into socialist propaganda mills; by employing the ACLU to rip religious underpinnings out from under American culture and jurisprudence; and, lately, by undermining objective science itself by means of advocacy groups ranging from Greenpeace and the Sierra Club to the so-called Union of Concerned Scientists, American and Western socialists and Marxists not only left our society vulnerable to being blindsided by an enemy it chose not to see. They further hamper us in achieving victory against this enemy because they actively and continuously undermine our ability to mount a sustained, unified response.
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