Bruce Bawer: D'Souza IS "The Enemy at Home"

While Europe Slept author Bruce Bawer has posted on his website an incisive (think sabre-toothed-cat upon whose tail some fool hath trod) dissection of Dinesh D'Souza's "jaw-droppingly repulsive screed, The Enemy at Home."

Charging that “the cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11,” [D'Souza] wants good Christians to recognize that Islamic values resemble their own—and that the real enemy is those fags next door. If only they’d retarget their rage, thereby showing their respect for “traditional values,” Muslims would stop hating the USA. D’Souza... invites us to “imagine how American culture looks and feels to someone who has been raised in a traditional society… where homosexuality is taboo and against the law… " Let it be recalled that D’Souza is referring here to a “traditional society” in which girls of 13 or 14 are routinely forced to marry their cousins, and in which the groom, if his conjugal attentions are resisted on the wedding night, is encouraged by his new in-laws to take his bride by force.

D'Souza, Bawer notes, is excruciatingly selective in presenting his alleged evidence for the "purity" of Muslim society.

Forget the sky-high rates of wife-beating and intrafamily rape in Muslim households; forget the stoning to death of gays and rape victims—D’Souza offers only scattered, rote, and understated acknowledgments that Muslim domestic culture might not be 100 percent morally pure (“There is, of course, no excuse for the abuses of patriarchy”). He ignores the Muslim schoolbooks and media that routinely depict Jews as subhumans who merit extinction; he winks at the current persecution of “traditional, family oriented” Christians (and Hindus) across the Muslim world; and he pretends that “most traditional Muslims” condemn honor killings. (On the contrary, when European Muslims slaughter their daughters, journalists struggle to find coreligionists who’ll criticize them for doing so.)

According to D'Souza, we must repent and take steps to bring our "decadent" culture in line with Muslim "ideals".

But he deliberately obscures the mountains of evidence that for “traditional Muslims,” even small-town 1940s America wouldn’t do. For example, in sympathetically describing the outraged response of Sayyid Qutb, the father of modern Islamism, to America’s debauchery, D’Souza neatly skirts the fact that Qutb first witnessed that debauchery at a church dance in the then-dry burg of Greeley, Colorado, in 1948—a year when, as Robert Spencer has noted, the highlights of America’s decadent pop culture included the movie Easter Parade and Dinah Shore’s recording of “Buttons and Bows.”

And Bawer is not one of those who dare not call it Treason.

For those who cherish freedom, 9/11 was intensely clarifying. Presumably it, and its aftermath, have been just as clarifying for D’Souza, whose book leaves no doubt whatsoever that he now unequivocally despises freedom—that open homosexuality and female “immodesty” are, in his estimation, so disgusting as to warrant throwing one’s lot in with religious totalitarians. Shortly after The Enemy at Home came out, a blogger recalled that in 2003, commenting in the National Review on the fact that “influential figures” in America’s conservative movement felt “that America has become so decadent that we are ‘slouching towards Gomorrah,’” D’Souza wrote: “If these critics are right, then America should be destroyed.” Well, D’Souza has now made it perfectly clear that he’s one of those critics; and the book he’s written is nothing less than a call for America’s destruction. He is the enemy at home. Treason is the only word for it.

My apologies if I didn't get the block quotes right on this post. In any case, you can read it all at: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=152059