Dinesh D'Souza is perhaps the clearest and most articulate thinker of our time. He brings into pinpoint focus the issues of the warfare between liberal and conservative Americans, and its bearing on radical Islam. It's a lengthy article, but well worth the read.
THE
ENEMY AT HOME:
THE CULTURAL LEFT AND ITS RESPONSIBILITY FOR
9/11
by Dinesh D'Souza
In
this book I make a claim that will seem startling at the outset.
The cultural left in this country (such people as Hillary Clinton,
Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, George Soros, Michael
Moore, Bill Moyers, and Noam Chomsky) is responsible for causing
9/11. The term “cultural left” does not refer to the
Democratic Party. Nor does it refer to all liberals. It
refers to the left wing of the Democratic Party—admittedly the most
energetic group among Democrats, and the main source of the party’s
ideas. The cultural left also includes a few Republicans,
notably those who adopt a left-wing stance on foreign policy and
social issues. Moreover, the cultural left includes
organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the
National Organization for Women, People for the American Way, Planned
Parenthood, Human Rights Watch, and moveon.org.
In
faulting the cultural left, I am not making the absurd accusation
that this group blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the
media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector and the universities are the
primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting
from the Islamic world. 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. Thus without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have
happened.
I
realize that this is a strong charge, one that no one has made
before. But it is a completely neglected aspect of the
9/11 debate, and it is critical to understanding the current debate
over the war against terrorism. Here in America, the political
right routinely accuses the left of being weak in its response to
Islamic terrorism. For example, conservatives often
allege that the left’s desire to “understand” the roots of
Islamic discontent dilutes American resolve in fighting the enemy.
If this is true, then fortifying the left’s resolve becomes
the obvious solution. My argument is quite different.
It is that the left is the primary reason for Islamic
anti-Americanism as well as the anti-Americanism of other traditional
cultures around the world. I intend to show that the left
has actively fostered the intense hatred of America that has led to
murderous attacks such as 9/11. If I am right, then no
war against terrorism can be effectively fought using the left-wing
premises that are now accepted doctrine among mainstream liberals and
Democrats.
The
left is responsible for 9/11 in the following ways. First,
the cultural left has fostered a decadent American culture that
angers and repulses traditional societies, especially those in the
Islamic world, that are being overwhelmed with this culture.
In addition, the left is waging an aggressive global campaign to
undermine the traditional patriarchal family and to promote secular
values in non-Western cultures. This campaign has
provoked a violent reaction from Muslims who believe that their most
cherished beliefs and institutions are under assault. Further,
the cultural left has routinely affirmed the most vicious prejudices
about American foreign policy held by radical factions in the Muslim
world, and then it has emboldened those factions to attack the United
States with the firm conviction that “America deserves it” and
that they can do so with relative impunity. Absent these
conditions, Osama Bin Laden would never have contemplated the 9/11
attacks, nor would the United States today be the target of Islamic
radicals throughout the world. Thus when leading figures on the
left say, “We made them do this to us,” in a sense they are
correct. They are not correct that “America” is to blame.
But their statement is true in that their
actions and their
America are responsible for fostering Islamic anti-Americanism in
general and 9/11 in particular.
We
cannot understand any of this without rethinking 9/11. Only
now, with some distance, are we in a position to understand 9/11 and
its implications. So far, we have fundamentally
misunderstood the enemy. Even more tragically, we have
misunderstood ourselves. The mixed results in the “war
against terrorism,” the stalemate in Iraq, the seemingly
inexhaustible supply of suicide bombers bent on killing Americans,
and the public anxiety about America’s Middle East policy, are all
the tragic consequence of these errors.
Even
so, the errors are understandable. 9/11 was a deeply
traumatic event. It produced two reactions: “One America”
and “Us vs. Them.” One America refers to the
coming-together of the American tribe, and such tribal unity is
typically based on emotional displays of patriotism. The second
reaction was Us vs. Them—a blind rage toward the enemy.
The immediate desire was to annihilate, not understand, the
attacker.
The
early statements by the Bush administration reflected this unified
belligerence. The terrorists are stateless outlaws. They
are not Muslims. They are apostates to Islam. True Muslims must
denounce them. They are fanatics. They are lunatics.
They are suicidal maniacs who don’t care about their lives.
These themes were echoed across the political spectrum.
Now, with reflection and more information, we can see that these
statements are false. Specifically, the terrorists were not
stateless outlaws. The Al Qaeda training camps were supported
by the Taliban government in Afghanistan. As their
diaries showed, the terrorists were deeply pious Muslims.
Traditional Muslims were reluctant to denounce them as apostates to
Islam because they were not apostates to Islam. Nor were
they lunatics or even suicidal in the conventional sense. By
definition a suicide is someone who doesn’t want to live.
The terrorists wanted to live, but they were willing to die for a
cause that they deemed higher. Not that they loved their
life less, but they hated America more.
Once
the initial shock subsided, so did the national unity it had
produced. Soon a heated debate broke out in America about the
meaning of 9/11 and the ongoing “war against terrorism,” a debate
that quickly broke down into partisan camps: the left versus the
right, the liberals versus the conservatives, Blue America versus Red
America. In a moment of genuine indignation, left-wing activist
Michael Moore conveyed how large a chasm separates the two Americas.
Reacting to 9/11, Moore posted the following message on his website.
“Many families have been devastated tonight. This is just not
right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this
to get back to Bush then they did so by killing thousands of people
who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, D.C., and the
planes’ destination of California—these were places that voted
AGAINST Bush!” Moore’s eruption, read with hindsight,
seems slightly comic. It’s hard to imagine Bin Laden and his
associates distinguishing between Bush supporters and Bush opponents
for the purpose of launching attacks. The most striking
aspect of Moore’s statement, however, is its implication that Al
Qaeda hit the wrong target. According to Moore, they
should have hit Red America, not Blue America! However
objectionable this may seem to many Americans, Moore’s statement is
important because of the connection it instinctively makes between
two apparently disparate events: a) the 9/11 attacks, and b) the
internal divide between Red America and Blue America. I believe
that the significance of this divide for understanding 9/11 and the
“war against terrorism” has not been adequately appreciated.
On
the other side of the spectrum, the fundamentalist preacher Jerry
Falwell confirmed in equally strong terms his perception of the
political divide, even while invoking God’s wrath on the sinners in
Blue America. “The Lord has protected us so wonderfully
these past 225 years,” Falwell said. He worried that
something “has caused God to lift the veil of protection which has
allowed no one to attack America on our soil.” Falwell did
not shrink from specifying, “The abortionists have got to bear some
burden for this because God will not be mocked. I really
believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and
the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an
alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of
them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in
their face and say: You helped this happen.”
Unlike Moore, Falwell was fiercely denounced for his comments, and he
promptly apologized for them.
These
words are not insightful in the theological sense that Falwell
intended. I cannot make sense of Falwell’s suggestion
that God used 9/11 to punish America for its sins. If God was
aiming for the abortionists and the feminists and the homosexuals, it
seems He mostly killed stockbrokers and soldiers and janitors (some
of whom may have been homosexual, but few of whom probably had second
jobs as abortionists.) The real issue raised by Falwell’s
comments is entirely secular. What impact did the abortionists,
the feminists, the homosexual activists and the secularists have on
the Islamic radicals who conspired to blow up the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon? Unfortunately this crucial question got
buried, and virtually no one has raised it publicly.
Why
is it so maddeningly difficult, even years after the fact, to make
sense of 9/11? One reason is that the very terms used by both sides
in the debate are misleading. Consider the very name of
the war America is fighting: a War Against Terrorism. But
America is no more fighting a “war against terrorism” than during
World War II it was fighting a “war against kamikazism.”
No, during World War II the United States was fighting the armies of
Imperial Japan. Kamikazism was simply the tactic or
strategy used by the enemy. In the same vein, America
today is not fighting against “terrorism.” There are
terrorist groups all over the world: the IRA in Northern Ireland, the
Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Maoist rebels in Nepal, the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the Shining Path
guerillas in Peru. Is America at war with all these groups?
Of course not. The war is against a virulent species of
Islamic radicalism. Terrorism is merely the weapon of choice
used by the enemy to intimidate and kill us. In this sense Bin
Laden is not so much a terrorist as he is anreligious ideologue who
has chosen terrorism as the most effective way to achieve his goals.
***
It’s time go back to the drawing board, and the logical place to
start is the debate over 9/11. On the left, scholars like
Edward Said, Richard Falk and Noam Chomsky have argued that 9/11 was
the result of Islamic anger over American foreign policy. In
this view, echoed by politicians like Ted Kennedy and liberal
magazines like The
American Prospect,
the radical Muslims don’t hate us because of who we are, they hate
us because of what we’ve done to them. As leftist
commentators never tire of pointing out, the West has a long history
of colonialism and imperialism. Even today, they say, America
one-sidedly supports Israel and props up dictatorial regimes (notably
Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) in the Muslim world. The
left-wing view can be summed up this way: they are justifiably
furious at us because we are the bad guys.
The
word that deserves our most careful attention in the previous
sentence is “we.” When the left says “we” it doesn’t
mean “we.” The left’s “we” is not intended as
self-incrimination. This is why the conservative complaint about
“liberal guilt” is so beside the point. Liberals do not
consider themselves guilty in the slightest. When a
leftist politician or blogger bemoans “how we overthrew Mossadegh
in Iran” or expresses outrage at “what we did at Guantanamo Bay
and Abu Ghraib,” the speaker does not mean “what I and other
people like me did.” In formulations like this, “we”
really means “you.” The apparent confession is really a
disguised form of accusation. The liberal’s point is that
Bush is guilty, conservatives are guilty, America is guilty.
Specifically, the liberal is saying to the conservative, “Your
America is responsible for this. Your America is greedy,
selfish, imperialist. Your America extols the principles of
democracy and human rights, but in practice backs savage dictators
for the purpose of maintaining American access to Middle Eastern
oil.” Thus without saying so directly, the left holds the
right and its conduct of American foreign policy responsible for
9/11.
On
the social and cultural front, the American left clearly does not
approve of the way of life in Muslim countries, partly those under
the sway of Islamic fundamentalism. It is common to
see left-wingers walking around with clothes featuring the
swashbuckling visage of Che Guevara, but you will never see liberals
and leftists wearing T-shirts displaying the raven’s stare of the
Ayatollah Khomeini. Indeed, the left detests the social
conservatism that is the hallmark of the whole swath of cultures
stretching from the Middle East to China. Those cultures
are viewed by many Western liberals as backward, hierarchical,
patriarchal, and deeply oppressive. And of these cultures none
seem to be more reactionary than Islamic culture. Indeed the
regimes supported by the Islamic fundamentalists are undoubtedly the
most illiberal in the modern world. In Iran, for example,
the ruling regime routinely imprisons its critics who are dubbed
“enemies of Islam.” Public floggings have been used to make
an example of women found guilty of fornication.
Homosexuality is harshly punished in fundamentalist regimes.
The Taliban, for instance, had a range of penalties. As one
Taliban leader explained, “One group of scholars believes you
should take these people to the top of the highest building in the
city, and hurl them to their deaths. The other recommends that you
dig a pit near a wall somewhere, put these people into it, and then
topple the wall so they are buried alive.”
Even
so, it is rare to see the illiberal practices of Muslim cultures
aggressively denounced by American or European liberals.
There are a few notable exceptions, such as Christopher Hitchens and
Paul Berman. But in general liberals seem to condemn
illiberal regimes only when they are allied with the United States.
Nor do liberals seem eager to support American efforts to overthrow
hostile, illiberal regimes. Berman, who supported Bush’s
invasion of Iraq, counts “maybe fifteen or twenty” liberals who
shared his position on this issue. If the case of Iraq is any
indication, most liberals actively oppose American efforts to use
military power to install regimes that are more pro-American and
pro-Western and embody a more liberal set of values, such as
self-government, minority rights, and religious tolerance.
Indeed the central thrust of the left’s foreign policy is to
prevent America from forcibly replacing illiberal regimes with more
liberal ones. This is a genuine mystery.
Liberal
resistance to American foreign policy cannot be explained as a
consequence of pacifism or even a reluctance to use force. With
the exception of a few fringe figures, the cultural left is not
pacifist. Its elected representatives—the Clintons, Ted
Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer—frequently support the use of
American force. For instance, President Clinton ordered
systematic bombings in Bosnia and Kosovo during his terms in office.
Clinton’s airstrikes were warmly endorsed in speeches by liberal
Democrats such as Boxer, Paul Wellstone, David Bonior and Carl
Levin. Cultural liberals routinely call for America to
intervene, by force if necessary, in places like Haiti and Rwanda.
So liberals are not in principle opposed to “regime change” or to
American intervention.
How,
then, can we explain the mystery of liberal opposition to American
foreign policy acting to secure liberal principles abroad?
Superficially, the left’s position can be explained by its
attachment to multiculturalism. In other words, liberal
antagonism toward the beliefs and mores of traditional cultures is
moderated by its conviction, “Who are we to judge these cultures?”
This concept of withholding judgment is a product of multiculturalism
and cultural relativism, both of which are based on the theory that
there are no universal standards to judge other cultures. Our
standards apply only to us.
But
again, this multicultural rhetoric is a smoke-screen. Liberal
activists mercilessly condemn other regimes and cultures when they
are friendly toward the United States. In the past liberals
showed no hesitation to condemn the Philippines under Marcos,
Nicaragua under Somoza, or even Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (as long as
America was allied with Hussein during the 1980s). Today
liberal Congressmen and talk show hosts are quick to deride
pro-American despots like Egypt’s Mubarak or the Saudi royal
family. As a practical matter, liberal multiculturalism only
inhibits liberal condemnation and liberal judgment when the regime in
question is a sworn enemy of the United States. The
suspicion of treason, although distasteful, is inevitable.
What else could account for this bizarre double-standard?
Why would so many liberals oppose American foreign policy actions
even when they would advance liberal principles abroad?
Treason
is not the problem. To see what is, let us consider two
revealing exhibits. The first is a short article by a
left-leaning writer, Kristine Holmgren, that appeared shortly after
9/11. Holmgren wrote, “Even in my waking hours, I am
afraid.” Was she afraid of a second 9/11-style attack?
Not at all. “Nor am I afraid of planes striking my home
or my children dying in their beds.” What, then, was the
source of Holmgren’s trepidation? “My fears are more
practical,” she explained. Here in America, Holmgren
wrote, the forces of Christian fundamentalism are gaining strength.
They are threatening abortion rights and civil liberties. “My
local school district is so afraid of adolescent sexuality, drug use
and music videos that they are willing to suspend civil rights to
proselytize for Jesus Christ.” Holmgren concludes on a
grim note. “Fascism crept upon post-World War I Europe with
the same soft, calm footsteps it is using these days in the United
States.” Here in clear view is the cultural left’s
mindset. Just two months after 9/11, with its memory still
fresh in the national consciousness, Holmgren candidly confesses that
she is less scared of Bin Laden than she is of Christian activists on
her school board. In her view Bin Laden might do episodic
damage, but the Christians are on their way to establishing a fascist
theocracy in America!
For
my second exhibit I offer excerpts from Senator Robert Byrd’s
recent book Losing
America.
In an early chapter, Byrd faults President Bush for his repeated
references to the Islamic radicals as evil. “Presidents must
measure their words and look past such raw simplicities,” Byrd
opined. “The notion of ‘evil’ and ‘evildoers’ tends
to set one faith against another and could be seen as a slur on the
Islamic faith. Bush’s draconian ‘them’ versus ‘us,’
‘good’ and ‘evil,’ serves little purpose other than to divide
and inflame.” On the face of it, this passage seems to
suggest Byrd’s high-minded objection to using crude terms like good
and evil to describe the world we live in. Byrd’s point is
that even if those labels are superficially descriptive, we should
avoid them because they create unnecessary hostility and division.
A
little later on in Byrd’s book, however, we find Byrd comparing
President Bush to Hermann Goering and the Nazis. Byrd
accuses Bush of “capitalizing on the war for political
purposes—using the war as a tool to win elections” which is “an
affront to the men and women we are sending to fight and die in a
foreign land and without good reason.” Moreover, Byrd charges
Bush with “a political gambit to keep the American people fearful”
through a strategy of “silencing opposition” and diverting
people’s attention toward the war on terror and away from “the
country’s festering problems.” Now if these charges are
true, if Bush has concocted an unnecessary war that causes the deaths
of American citizens for no reason other than to benefit himself
politically, then he deserves impeachment and everlasting disgrace.
Indeed in some ways Bush would be worse than Goering because at least
Goering believed in a cause larger than himself.
By
these accusations, Byrd forces us to revise our interpretation of his
earlier words. He shows, by implication rather than outright
suggestion, that he agrees
with Bush that some people are fundamentally evil and they deserve to
be treated as such. Only in Byrd’s analysis it is the
Bush administration and its allies, rather than the Islamic radicals,
who are the genuinely evil force in the world. Thus
dividing and inflaming, which Byrd thinks a harsh and self-defeating
strategy in dealing with Islamic fundamentalism, is precisely Byrd’s
strategy in dealing with the Bush administration.
These
examples show the wrong-headedness of the insinuation of liberal
treachery. Holmgren and Byrd don’t hate America.
What they hate is conservative
America.
The two are fiercely loyal to the American values that they cherish,
and it is in the name of those values that they are ready to take on
the Bush administration. The lesson of these examples is
that the cultural left is unwilling to fight a serious and sustained
battle against Islamic radicalism and fundamentalism because it is
fighting a more threatening political battle against American
conservatism and American fundamentalism. The left cannot
support Bush’s efforts to promote liberal democracy abroad because
it is more important for the left to reverse the nation’s
conservative tide by defeating Bush and his socially conservatives
allies at home. In other words, the left’s war is not against
bearded Muslims who wear long robes and carry rifles; it is against
pudgy white men who wear suits and carry bibles. While the left
is certainly not comfortable with Islamic mullahs, it is vastly more
terrified of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Antonin Scalia, James Dobson
and Rush Limbaugh.
Why?
From the vantage point of many liberals, our fundamentalists are as
dangerous as their fundamentalists, and President Bush is no less a
threat than Bin Laden. Author Salman Rushdie, who should
know something about this topic, asserts that “the religious
fundamentalism of the United States is as alarming as anything in the
much-feared world of Islam.” Columnist Maureen Dowd
accused the Bush administration of following the lead of Islamic
fundamentalists in “replacing science with religion, and facts with
faith” and creating in the process “jihad in America…a scary,
paranoid, regressive reality.” Author and illustrator Art
Spiegelman asserts, “We’re equally threatened by Al Qaeda and our
own government.” Pursuing the equation between Islamic
fundamentalists and the Bush administration, columnist Wendy Kaminer
described 9/11 as a “faith-based initiative.”
But
if the left sees Christian fundamentalism in the same way as Islamic
fundamentalism, why doesn’t it fight the two with equal
resolution? If Bush is as bad as Bin Laden, why not
expend equal effort to get rid of both? In reality, the
cultural left is more indignant over Bush’s Christian
fundamentalism than over Bin Laden’s Islamic fundamentalism.
Activist Cindy Sheehan makes this clear when she alleges that “the
biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush.” Other
leading figures on the left confirm the view that Bush and his
supporters, not Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, are the real problem.
Social critic Edward Said, who has spent most of his career warning
of the dangers of overestimating the threat of Islamic extremism,
warns in a recent book that “the vast number of Christian fanatics
in the United States,” who form “the core of George Bush’s
support,” now represent “a menace to the world.”
Jonathan Raban writes, “The greatest military power in history has
shackled its deadly hardware to the rhetoric of fundamentalist
Christianity.” Writer Jane Smiley finds the people who voted
for Bush to be “predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and
arrogant…They are full of original sin and have a taste for
violence.” Eric Alterman fumes in The
Nation,
“Extremist right-wingers enjoy a stranglehold on our political
system.” Author Jonathan Schell insists that “Bush’s
abuses of presidential power are the most extensive in American
history.” Author Garry Wills alleges that the Bush
administration “weaves together a chain of extremisms encircling
the polity…forming a necklace to choke the large body of
citizens.” There is no indication that these liberal
authorities regard Islamic fundamentalism with anything approaching
this degree of alarm.
The
rhetoric of left-wing political leaders is equally revealing.
In examining speeches by Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi
or Edward Markey, I am struck by what may be called “the
indignation gap,” the vastly different level of emotion that the
speaker employs in treating Bin Laden and his allies as opposed to
Bush and his allies. At first the speaker will offer a ritual
condemnation of Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. “I am no fan of
Osama Bin Laden.” “We can agree that Bin Laden is not a very nice
guy.” Having gotten those qualifications out of the way, the
left-wing politician will spend the rest of the speech lambasting the
Bush conservatives with uncontrolled belligerence and ferocity.
In recent addresses Senator Kennedy denounced “the rabid
reactionary religious right” and maintained that “no president in
America’s history has done more damage to our country than George
W. Bush.” Senator Hillary Clinton accuses the Bush
White House and the Republican Congress of “systematically
weakening the democratic traditions and institutions on which this
country was built. They are turning back the clock on the
twentieth-century. There has never been an administration…more
intent upon consolidating and abusing power. It’s very
hard to stop people who have no shame…who have never been
acquainted with the truth.” Congressman Edward Markey
darkly warned, “They wish to wipe us out.”
The
“us” that Markey is concerned about here is not “Americans”
in general but specifically “liberals and leftists.” Here,
then, is a revealing clue to the motives of the left.
Many in this camp are more exercised by Bush than they are about Bin
Laden because, as they see it, Islamic fundamentalism threatens to
impose illiberal values abroad while American fundamentalism of the
Bush type threatens to impose illiberal values at home. As
leading figures on the left see it, the Islamic extremists pose a
danger to the freedom and lifestyle of others
while their American equivalents pose a danger to us.
Thus, for the left, the enemy at home is far more consequential and
frightening than the enemy abroad.
***
I
want to say more about these liberal fears, but first I want to say a
word about the conservative or right-wing understanding of 9/11.
It is a common belief on the right that many Muslims—perhaps most
Muslims—hate America because of a deep religious and cultural
divide between our civilization and theirs. In this view,
popularized by scholars such as Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington,
Western civilization stands for modern values such as prosperity,
freedom, and democracy, which the Muslim world rejects. In this
conservative view, Islamic radicals lash out at us because they blame
us for problems of poverty and tyranny that are actually the fault of
Muslims themselves. One variant of this position holds
that the radical Muslims are simply envious of American wealth and
power.
How,
then, do conservatives think America should respond to Muslim
antagonism? Some on the right, like Pat Buchanan, as well as
some libertarians, argue that the best way for America to protect
itself from Muslim rage is to withdraw from the Middle East—to
retreat behind our own borders. But the majority on the right,
led by the Bush administration, insists that America has no choice
but to fight the Islamic radicals because if we don’t defeat them
over there, they will bring the battle to us here. Most
conservatives seem to agree with Bush that war is the best and only
option. The general view on the right is that Bin Laden and the
Islamic radicals don’t despise us for what we do, they despise us
for who we are. As President Bush has said, on various
occasions, “They hate us because of our freedom.”
But
is this really true? There is no evidence that Muslims—or
even the Islamic fundamentalists—hate the West because the West is
modern, or because the West embodies technology, prosperity, and
democracy. There is a universal desire for prosperity in today’s
world, and the Islamic world is no exception. Moreover, Islamic
fundamentalists are not opposed to technology; it is technology that
enables them to build bombs and fly planes into buildings.
Many Al Qaeda operatives have scientific and technical (as opposed to
religious) training. Even among Islamic fundamentalists,
freedom is rarely condemned and the term is often used in a positive
sense, as in “Let us free ourselves from Western domination” or
“Let us liberate Muslim land from Israeli occupation.”
Finally, there is widespread support for democracy in the Muslim
world. While Bin Laden is an enemy of democracy, most of the
organizations of radical Islam, including Hamas and the Muslim
Brotherhood, have become champions of democracy. The reason is
quite simple: the Islamic radicals have seen that if their countries
have free elections, their group can win!
Shortly
after the fall of Baghdad, graffiti began to appear on the walls of
the city and its environs. The following scrawl caught my
attention. “Marriage of the same sex became legal in
America. Is this, with the mafia and drugs, what you want to
bring to Iraq, America? Is this the freedom you promised?”
Even if the source of this statement is of little consequence, the
content is revealing. It is not an objection to freedom, but to
the kind of freedom associated with drug legalization and homosexual
marriage. As such, it is a vital clue to the sources of Muslim
rage. And here is an excerpt from a recent videotape by Ayman
al-Zawahiri, deputy of Bin Laden and reputed mastermind of the 9/11
attacks. “The freedom we want is not the freedom to use women
as a commodity to gain clients, win deals, or attract tourists; it is
not the freedom of AIDS and an industry of obscenities and homosexual
marriages; it is not the freedom of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.”
What
these statements convey is that these Islamic radicals do not hate
America because of its wealth and power; they hate America because of
how Americans use that wealth and power. They do not hate us
for our freedom; they hate us because of what we do with our
freedom. The radical Muslims are convinced that America and
Europe have become sick, demented societies that destroy religious
belief, undermine traditional morality, dissolve the patriarchal
family, and corrupt the innocence of children. The term that
Islamic radicals use to describe Western influence is firangi.
The term means “Frankish” disease, and it refers to syphilis, a
disease that Europeans first introduced to the Middle East.
Today Muslims use the term in a metaphorical sense, to describe the
social and moral corruption produced by the virus of Westernization.
The
Muslims who hate us the most are the ones who have encountered
Western decadence, either in the West or in their own countries.
The revealing aspect of the 9/11 terrorists is not that so many came
from Saudi Arabia, but that so many of them, like the ring-leader
Muhammad Atta and his Hamburg group, had lived in and been exposed to
the West. My point is that their hatred was not a product
of ignorance but of familiarity; not of Wahhabi indoctrination but of
first-hand observation.
But
isn’t it true, as many Americans believe, that American culture is
broadly appealing around the world? Yes, and this is
precisely why America and not Europe is the main target of the
Islamic radicals. Decadence is arguably far worse in Europe
than America, and Europe has had its share of attacks, such as the
Madrid train bombing of 2004 and the London subway bombing of 2005.
But even in those cases the European targets were picked because of
their governments’ support for America. The Islamic radicals
focus on America because they recognize that it is the leader of
Western civilization or, as they sometimes put it, “the greatest
power of the unbelievers.” Bin Laden himself said in a 1998
interview, “What prompted us to address the American government is
the fact that it is the head of the Western and crusading forces in
their fight against Islam and against Muslims.”
Moreover, Muslims realize that it is American culture and values that
are penetrating the far corners of the globe, corroding ancient
orthodoxies, and transforming customs and institutions.
Many Americans, whatever their politics, generally regard such change
as healthy and good. But this attitude is not shared in
traditional societies, and it is virtually nonexistent in the Muslim
world. America is feared and despised there not in spite of its
cultural allure but because of it.
An
anecdote will illustrate my point. Some time ago I saw an
interview with a Muslim sheikh on a European TV channel.
The interviewer told the sheikh, “I find it curious and
hypocritical that you are so anti-American, considering that two of
your relatives are living and studying in America.” The
sheikh replied, “But this is not hypocritical at all. I
concede that American culture is appealing, especially to young
people. If you put a young man into a hotel room and give
him dozens of pornography tapes, he is likely to find those appealing
as well. What America appeals to is everything that is low and
disgusting in human nature.”
There
seems to be a growing belief in traditional cultures—a belief
encouraged but by no means created by Islamic fundamentalism—that
America is materially prosperous but culturally decadent.
It is technologically sophisticated but morally depraved. As
former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto puts it, “Within the
Muslim world, there is a reaction against the sexual overtones that
come across in American mass culture. America is viewed through
this prism as an immoral society.” In his book The
Crisis of Islam,
Bernard Lewis rehearses what he calls the “standard litany of
American offenses recited in the lands of Islam” and ends with this
one: “Yet the most powerful accusation of all is the
degeneracy and debauchery of the American way of life.”
As these observations suggest, what angers religious Muslims is not
the American Constitution but the scandalous sexual mores they see on
American movies and television. What disgusts them are
not free elections but the sights of hundreds of homosexuals kissing
each other and taking marriage vows. The person that
horrifies them the most is not John Locke but Hillary Clinton.
In
other cultures—China, Nigeria, India—there are similar concerns
that American culture and values are destroying the moral basis of
those traditional societies. This resistance is summed up in a
slogan often used by Singapore’s former prime minister Lee Kuan
Yew: Modernization without Westernization. What this
means is that traditional cultures want prosperity and technology,
but they don’t want to become like America. The Islamic
fundamentalists are the most extreme and politically mobilized
segment of this global resistance. What distinguishes
them is the depth of their repulsion, and their willingness to fight
and to die to repel American influence from their part of the
world.
The
main reason is that they believe that the fate of Islam is at stake.
Bin Laden in one of his videos said that Islam faces the greatest
threat it has faced since Muhammad. How could he possibly think
this? Not because of U.S. troops in Mecca. Not even
because of Israel. The threat Bin Laden is referring to is an
infiltration of American values and mores into the life of Muslims,
transforming their society and destroying their religious beliefs.
Even the term “Great Satan,” so commonly used to denounce America
in the Muslim world, is better understood when we recall that in the
traditional understanding, shared by Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam, Satan is not a conqueror; he is a tempter. In one of its
best-known verses, the Koran describes Satan as “the insidious one
who whispers into the hearts of men.”
***
These
concerns prompt a startling thought: are the radical Muslims right?
Is America a threat to the traditional cultures of the world?
Is American culture a worldwide destroyer of morals? Do
American values undermine the traditional family and corrupt the
innocence of children? Many Americans are likely to
indignantly answer, “No.” Even conservatives are reluctant
to admit that some radical Muslims may have valid objections to
American society. Patriotism itself seems to demand an
American response that highlights the horrors of Islamic behavior.
“Look how your religion inspires terrorists to kill women and
children!” “Look how you oppress women!” As broad
judgments on Muslim society, these charges are ethnocentric, which is
to say they reflect a narrow, prejudiced view of Islamic culture.
But even if the charges were true, they would hardly constitute a
vindication of American culture.
We
should not dismiss the Islamic or traditional critique so easily.
In fact, as our own domestic and cultural debate shows, we know that
many of the concerns raised by the radical Muslims are widely-shared
in our own society. Indeed, many conservative and
religious Americans agree with the Islamic fundamentalists that
American culture has become increasingly vulgar, trivial and
disgusting. I am not merely referring to the reality shows
where contestants eat maggots or the talk shows where guests reveal
the humiliating details of their sex lives. I am also referring
to “high culture,” to liberal culture that offers itself as
refined and sophisticated.
Here,
for example, is a brief excerpt from Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina
Monologues,” a play that won rave reviews and Hollywood accolades
and is now routinely performed (according to its own publicity
materials) in “more than 20 countries, including China and
Turkey.” In the book version of the play—now sold in
translation in Pakistan, India, and Egypt—Ensler offers what she
terms “Vagina Occurrences”: “Glenn Close gets 2,500
people to stand up and chant the word cunt…There
is now a Cunt Workshop at Wesleyan University…Roseanne performs
‘What Does Your Vagina Smell Like?” in her underwear for two
thousand people…Alanis Morisette and Audra McDonald sing the cunt
piece.” And so on. If all of this makes many Americans
uncomfortable and embarrassed—which may be part of Ensler’s
objective—one can only imagine how it is received in traditional
cultures where the public recitation of such themes and language is
considered a grotesque violation of manners and morals. Nor
is Ensler an extreme example. If the garbage heap of
American excess leaves many Americans feeling dirty and defiled at
home, what gives America the right to dump it on the rest of the
world?
The
debate over popular culture points to a deeper issue. For
the past quarter-century we have been having a “culture war” in
this country which has, until now, been viewed as a debate with only
domestic ramifications. I believe that it has momentous global
consequences as well. When we debate hot-button issues
like abortion, school prayer, divorce, gay marriage, and so on, we
are debating two radically different views of liberty and morality.
Issues like divorce and family breakdown are important in themselves,
yet they are ultimately symptoms of a great moral shift that has
occurred in American society, one that continues to divide and
polarize this country, and one that is at the root of the
anti-Americanism of traditional cultures.
The
cultural shift can be described in this way. Some years
ago I read Tom Brokaw’s book The
Greatest Generation,
which describes the virtues of the World War II generation. I
asked myself whether this was truly the “greatest” generation.
Was it greater than the generation of the American founding?
Greater than the civil war generation? I don’t think so.
The significant thing about the World War II generation was
that it was the last generation. Last in what way? It was
the last generation to embrace an external code of traditional
morality. Indeed this generation’s great failure was that it
was unable to inculcate this moral code in its children.
Thus the frugal, self-disciplined, deferred-gratification generation
of World War II produced the spoiled children of the 1960s—the
Clinton generation.
From
the American founding until World War II, there was a widespread
belief in this country that there is a moral order in the universe
that makes claims on us. This belief was not unique to
Americans. It was shared by Europeans since the very beginning
of Western civilization, and it is held even today by all the
traditional cultures of the world. The basic notion is
that morality is external to us, and it is binding on us. In
the past, Americans and Europeans, being for the most part Christian,
might disagree with Hindus and Muslims about the exact source of this
moral order, its precise content, or how a society should convert its
moral beliefs into legal and social practice. But there
was little doubt across the civilizations of the world about the
existence of such an order. Moreover laws and social norms
typically reflected this moral consensus. During the first half
of the twentieth-century, the moral order generated some clear
American social norms: Go to church. Be faithful to your wife.
Support your children. Go when your country calls. And so
on. The point is not that everyone lived up to the dictates of
the moral code, but that it supplied a standard, accepted virtually
throughout society, for how one should act.
What
has changed in America since the 1960s is the erosion of belief in an
external moral order. This is the most important political fact of
the past half-century. I am not saying that most
Americans today reject morality. I am saying that there
has been a great shift in the source of morality.
Today there is no longer a moral consensus in American society.
Today many Americans locate morality not in a set of external
commands but in the imperatives of their own heart. For
them, morality is not “out there” but “in here.” While
many Americans continue to believe in the old morality, there is now
a new morality in America which may be called the morality of the
inner self, the morality of self-fulfillment.
Here,
at the deepest level, is the divide between conservatives and
liberals, between Red America and Blue America.
Conservatives believe in traditional morality. Liberals believe
in personal autonomy and self-fulfillment. And liberals have
been winning the culture war in the sense that they have been able to
produce a massive transformation of American society and culture
along the lines of their new moral code. My point is not that
liberals would approve of all the grossness and sensuality of
contemporary popular culture, but that the liberal promotion of
autonomy, individuality and self-fulfillment as moral ideals make it
impossible to question or criticize or place limits on these cultural
trends. In the moral code of self-fulfillment, “pushing
the envelope” or testing the borders of sexual and moral tolerance
becomes a virtue, and fighting for traditional morality becomes a
form of repression or vice.
To
American liberals, the great social revolution of the past few
decades—with its 1.5 million abortions a year, with one in two
marriages ending in divorce, with homosexuality coming “out of the
closet” and now seeking full social recognition and approval—is
viewed through the prism of an expansion of civil liberties, “freedom
of choice,” and personal autonomy. Thus it is seen as a moral
achievement. But viewed from the perspective of people in
the traditional societies of the world, notably the Muslim world,
these same trends appear nothing less than the shameless promotion of
depravity. So it is not surprising to see pious Muslims
react with horror at the prospect of this new American morality
seeping into their part of the world. They fear that this
new morality will destroy their religion and way of life, and they
are quite right.
Osama
Bin Laden chose his words carefully when he said that 9/11 was an
attempt to scorch “the head of the snake.” In the view of
the Islamic radicals, America is the embodiment of pagan depravity.
According to Bin Laden, this is why religious Muslims must stop
fighting local battles and concentrate on destroying Satan’s empire
on earth. This is seen as nothing less than a divine mission.
In Bin Laden’s words, 9/11 showed “America struck by Almighty God
its vital organs.” For the Islamic radicals, 9/11 was a
message to America that said, “Your America is a repulsive sewer.
This sewer is now pouring itself into the rest of the world.
We will fight to the death to keep it out of our part of the globe.
In fact, we will fight in any way we can until every vestige of your
sick, demented culture is eradicated from the holy ground of Islam.
We may be poor and oppressed, but we would rather be poor and
oppressed than become the immoral, perverted society that America has
become. So get the hell out of the Middle East, because you
represent the values of the devil.”
***
Thus we have the first way in which the cultural left is responsible
for 9/11. The left has produced a moral shift in American
society that has resulted in a deluge of gross depravity and
immorality. This deluge threatens to engulf our society and is
imposing itself on the rest of the world. The Islamic radicals
are now convinced that America represents the revival of pagan
barbarism in the world, and 9/11 represents their ongoing battle with
what they perceive to be the forces of Satan.
I
have focused so far on American cultural depravity and its global
impact. But there is a second way in which the cultural left
has helped to produce 9/11. In the domain of foreign
policy, the left has helped to produce the conditions that led to the
destruction of the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
First, under Jimmy Carter, the liberals helped to get rid of the Shah
of Iran and thus install the Khomeini regime in Iran. The
pretext was the Shah’s human rights failings, but the result was
the abdication of the Shah and the triumph of Khomeini.
The Khomeini revolution, which has proved the viability of Islamic
theocracy in the modern age, was the match that has lit the
conflagration of radicalism and fundamentalism throughout the Muslim
world. It is Khomeini’s success that paved the road to
9/11.
During
the Clinton administration, liberal foreign policy conveyed to Bin
Laden and his co-conspirators a strong impression of American
vacillation, weakness, and even cowardice. When Al Qaeda
attacked and killed a handful of Marines in Mogadishu in 1993, the
Clinton administration withdrew American troops from that country.
When Al Qaeda orchestrated the bombings of the American embassies in
East Africa in 1998 and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000,
President Clinton responded with a handful of desultory
counterstrikes that did little harm to Al Qaeda. These
American actions, Bin Laden has confessed, emboldened him to strike
directly at America on September 11, 2001.
Now
that America is fighting back, seeking to uproot the terrorists and
transform the political landscape in the Middle East, the left is
fighting hard to prevent that campaign from succeeding.
It does so not simply by resisting at every stage whatever actions
are proposed and implemented to win the war, but, just as
importantly, it unceasingly fuels the hatred of American foreign
policy among Muslims. It is a common belief among Muslims, for
example, that the main reason America consistently sides with Israel
is that Americans hate Muslims. A Muslim lawyer I
interviewed in Tunis puts the matter this way. “I keep
hearing,” he says, “that countries base their foreign policy on
self-interest. The self-interest of America is in obtaining
access to oil, and we are the ones who have all the oil. The
Israelis don’t have any oil. So why is America always on the
side of Israel and against the Muslims? Please don’t tell me
it’s because Israel is America’s only friend in the Middle East.
After all, Israel is one of the main reasons why so many Muslims are
America’s enemy. So I am forced to conclude that there is
only one reason why America acts against it self-interest and backs
Israel against the Muslims. The reason is that Americans hate
Arabs. America is violently opposed to Islam. So the
Christians are making allies with the Jews to get rid of Islam.”
This
is a relatively articulate expression of one of the central themes of
fundamentalist propaganda. This is the argument that America is
a bigoted nation that wants to take over Muslim countries and steal
their oil. In reality this claim is absurd. Americans do
not hate Muslims, and America does not want to occupy the Muslim
world or seize its natural resources. America supports Israel for
complex reasons of history, common ideology, and the domestic
political influence of Jewish Americans. So this Islamic
perception of American foreign policy is utterly wrong. But it
is routinely confirmed by the American left. The writings of
leading leftists affirm that yes, America is a racist power that
wants to conquer and plunder non-Western peoples. Anne Norton
writes that anti-Muslim bigotry is now “the unacknowledged
cornerstone of American foreign policy.” Legal scholar Mari
Matsuda insists that “the history of hating Arabs as a race runs
strong in the United States” where Arabs are “reviled even more
than blacks.” Rashid Khalidi contends that America’s
actions are based on “wildly inaccurate and often racist
stereotypes about Arabs, Islam, and the Middle East.”
Writing in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram,
Edward Said claims that “for decades in America there has been a
cultural war against the Arabs and Islam” and that Americas Middle
East policy is based on blind hatred for stereotypical “sheikhs and
camel jockeys.” By confirming Muslims in their worst
prejudices, the American left has strengthened their conviction that
America is evil and deserves to be destroyed.
To
repeat—because this a point on which I do not wish to be
misunderstood—I am in no sense suggesting that the left is disloyal
to America. To say this is to confuse the success of the Bush
administration, or even of American foreign policy, with the interest
of the country as a whole. As we saw earlier with Senator Byrd,
the left has its own view of what’s good for America, and it is
fiercely loyal to that ideal. So disloyalty is not the issue.
The issue is why the left is so passive, reluctant, and even
oppositional in its stance in the American war on terrorism. My
answer is that the cultural left opposes the war against the radical
Muslims because it wants them to succeed in defeating President Bush
in particular and American foreign policy in general. Far from
seeking to destroy the movement that Bin Laden and the Islamic
radicals represent, the amazing fact is that the American left is
secretly allied with that movement to undermine the Bush
administration and American foreign policy. The left
would like nothing better than to see America in general, and
President Bush in particular, forced out of Iraq. Although such
an outcome would plunge Iraq into further chaos and represent a
catastrophic loss for American foreign policy, it would represent a
huge win for the cultural left, in fact the left’s greatest foreign
policy victory since the Vietnam War.
The
notion that the American left seeks victory for Islamic radicals in
Iraq may at first glance seem implausible. One person who does
not think so, however, is Bin Laden. In his October 30, 2004
videotaped message, apparently timed to precede the presidential
election, Bin Laden drew liberally from themes in Michael Moore’s
Fahrenheit
911
to condemn the Bush administration. Bin Laden denounced
Bush for election-rigging in Florida, for going to war to enrich oil
companies and defense contracts like Halliburton, for curtailing
civil liberties under the Patriot Act, and for reading stories to
school-children while the World Trade Center burned. Apart from
the rhetorical flourishes of “Praise be to Allah,” Bin Laden
sounds exactly like Michael Moore. And why not? In
opposing President Bush and American foreign policy, they are both on
the same side.
Moreover,
several leading figures on the left are very candid about what they
are fighting for. Moore writes, “The Iraqis who have risen up
against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’
or ‘the enemy.’ They are the Revolution, the Minutemen, and
their numbers will grow—and they will win.” Author
James Carroll commends the insurgents for exemplifying “the simple
stubbornness of human beings who refuse to be told what to think and
feel.” Writing in salon.com, Joe Conason calls on Bush
to enter into a “negotiated settlement” with the Iraqi
insurgents, an outcome Conason concedes would be a “defeat for the
United States and a perceived victory for Al Qaeda and its allies.”
Gwyne Dyer states in a recent book, “The United States needs to
lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently,
the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq.”
Activist Arundhati Roy declares on behalf of the left, “We must
consider ourselves at war.” What she means is that the left
is fighting a political battle not against Al Qaeda or Islamic
fundamentalism but rather against the Bush administration.
In
placing the cultural left and the Islamic fundamentalists on the same
side, I am not trying to score a partisan or even an ideological
point. In fact, if the political left and the Islamic
fundamentalists are in the same foreign policy camp, then by the same
token the political right and the Islamic fundamentalists are on the
same wavelength on social issues. To put it bluntly, the left
is allied with some radical Muslims in opposition to American foreign
policy, and the right is allied with an even larger group of Muslims
in their opposition to American social and cultural depravity.
This is the essential new framework for understanding American
foreign policy and American social issues. I conclude by
spelling out the implications of these alignments for American
conservatives.
In
a way, conservatives are in the best position to understand why
traditional cultures fear and hate America. That’s because
conservatives share many of the moral concerns of traditional people.
The right should not be deaf to complaints about the
dissolution of religious and family ties, because it worries about
those things in this country. The right understands the
implications of the erosion of traditional morality, because it has
seen the consequences of that erosion in the United States. Thus the
right can play an important mediating role in helping America and the
traditional cultures of Asia, Africa and Latin America to understand
each other better.
But
so far the right has kept its blinders on since 9/11. The
isolationist right labors under the illusion that America can retreat
behind its borders and fight a one-front battle against the cultural
left at home. As a practical matter, this is foolish.
Islamic hatred of America will not go away if American troops come
home because this hatred is not based on the presence of American
troops abroad. Hasty withdrawals from Afghanistan or Iraq will
further embolden Bin Laden and his allies and make the United States
less, not more, safe.
The
right’s myopia, however, is not confined to the Buchanan and
libertarian wings. Mainstream conservatives (including the Bush
administration) understand better the military need to take the war
to the enemy, and also appreciate that there is a political battle to
be fought against the left at home. But most conservatives do
not see how these two battles are related to each other.
Moreover, the Bush administration is wrong to see the war against
Islamic radicalism as a purely military operation.
The military component is indispensable, but it is not sufficient to
achieve victory. The reason the war seems endless is that the
ranks of the enemy continue to grow. It is simply not
possible to kill all the terrorists because the engine of Islamic
rage is powerful enough to keep generating more of them. The
only way to win the war is to create a wedge between Islamic radicals
and traditional Muslims, and to support traditional Islam against
radical Islam.
To
date, the Bush administration has made no serious attempt to
articulate the moral case for American foreign policy to Muslims (or
to anyone else). Many conservatives compound the problem by
defending American decadence against the foreigners who hate and fear
it. Shortly after 9/11, the Bush administration began
consulting Hollywood executives and Madison Avenue executives to
market “brand America” abroad. To this day the
administration persists with this foolishness. Strangely enough
what the administration is promoting is liberal solutions—separation
of church and state, feminism and the idea of the working
woman—together with the debased values of American popular
culture. Of course these “solutions” only compound the
problem. They further alienate traditional Muslims and push
them toward the fundamentalist camp. So the liberals are
correct, in a sense, that U.S. policy is “creating more
terrorists,” but not for the reasons they think.
The
Bush administration and the conservatives must stop promoting
American popular culture because it is producing a blowback of Muslim
rage. With a few exceptions, the right should not bother to
defend American movies, music, and television. From the point
of view of traditional values, they are indefensible. Moreover,
why should the right stand up for the left’s debased values?
Why should our
people defend their
America? Rather, American conservatives should join the Muslims
and others in condemning the global moral degeneracy that is produced
by liberal values.
American
foreign policy should stand up for liberal values, but not for the
liberal values associated with the cultural left. Rather, it
must work to promote classical liberal ideas abroad. As
conservatives, we should export our America. That means
introducing in places in Iraq the principles of self-government,
majority rule, minority rights, free enterprise, and religious
toleration. But we must stop exporting the cultural left’s
America. That means we should stop insisting on radical
secularism, stop promoting the feminist conception of the family,
stop trying to promote abortion and “sex education,” and we
should try and halt the export of the vulgar and corrupting elements
of our popular culture. When we cannot do these things,
we should apologize to the rest of the world and make it clear that
we too find a good deal in this culture to be embarrassing and
disgusting.
There
is no “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West.
But there are two clashes of civilizations that are shaping the world
today. The first is a clash between liberal and conservative
values within America. The second is a clash between
traditional Islam and radical Islam, a clash within Islamic
society. So realize it or not, American conservatives are
fighting a two-front war. The first is a war against Islamic
radicalism and fundamentalism. The second is a political
struggle against the left and its pernicious political and moral
influence in America and around the globe. My conclusion is
that the two wars are intimately connected. In fact, we cannot
win the first war without also winning the second war.
