Dinesh D’Souza on ‘The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11’

“The Islamic radicals and the American left are polar opposites in the kind of society they want. One wants sharia and the other wants a libertine society with abortion on demand and gay marriage. And yet, the two have a common interest in defeating Bush’s war on terror…. Basically the left hates Bush more than it hates Bin Laden. Bin Laden is a foreign threat, but Bush is a domestic threat. In the last couple of decades the left-wing agenda has become increasingly dominated by social and sexual concerns. So who threatens abortion rights in America? Not Bin Laden, Bush. Who is blocking gay marriage? Not Al Qaeda, Bush’s court appointees. While Bin Laden wants sharia in Baghdad, Bush and the religious right are, in the leftist view, trying to impose sharia in Boston. Consequently the left is quite willing to ally with the lesser evil, the Islamic radicals, in order to defeat the greater evil, Bush and the conservatives.”

Read the rest of the interview at Townhall.com.

D'Souza also took part in a Q&A with NRO, which you can read here.

I expect D’Souza is going to get some criticism from other opponents of Jihad, (on Friday I heard Robert Spencer express great displeasure with the book), because D’Souza says he believes the majority of Muslims would be open to making common cause with social conservatives. D’Souza suggests to the NRO that “they’re not asking us to live like them. They’re asking us not to attack their religion, which conservatives do with depressing regularity.”

Personally, I think they do want us to live like them, though it is true they are not asking us to live like them.

But I could not agree more with D’Souza’s statement quoted above, that the left has made common cause with Islamic radicals because “the left hates Bush more than it hates Bin Laden” As a matter of fact, I was working on a similar idea myself, in a slightly altered version, before I ran across the interviews with D’Souza.

In my version of the hypothesis, the left hates Bush--not more than they hate Bin Laden--but more than they love their country. This enables them to defend, or even engage in, objectively treacherous activities without running afoul of their undoubtedly genuine affection for the land of their birth. They are in no way guilty of treason, because the object of their activities is not bringing harm to country, but bringing harm to the Bush administration. And, as almost every Democrat and virtually every member of the media on 7 continents will tell you, George W. Bush is the focus of evil in the modern world. You can provide al the examples you want of the ruthlessness of Islamic Jihadists: Bush is so much worse!

Commenting last summer on Peter Beinart’s [former editor of New Republic] book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, had this related observation on how the “McGovern revolution” in the Democratic party still has not yet run its course, and was still energizing the destructive partisan hatred that prevents liberals from being able to govern:

“If anything, the intensity of partisan anger against the person and the policies of the president seems to grow and grow. To speak of “our president” or of “our foreign policy” or even of “our troops” is to invite outraged reaction. What Peter Beinart knows, and yet, perhaps admirably, refuses to accept is that many of those whom he is trying to persuade have somewhere along the way decided that this is not their country. Which is not to say that they are not patriotic, but they are patriots of another America – an America of their preferences, an America at peace, an America without enemies.”