A propos of the D’Souza piece yesterday, a commenter wrote:

>It was hard to read a single paragraph (or sentence) in the D’Souza piece without a refutation, often obvious, coming to mind. I was starting to lose count of the straw men alone.

That’s just barely an exaggeration. Here is an edited (not for content) six part analysis of D’Souza’s op-ed. Apologies to those whose comments were lost in the process.

Part I

>As a conservative author, I’m used to a little controversy. Even so, the reaction to my new book, “The Enemy at Home,” has felt, well, a little hysterical.

>”Ratfink writes new book,” James Wolcott, cultural critic for Vanity Fair, declares in his blog. He goes on to call my book a “sleazy, shameless, ignorant, ahistorical, tendentious, meretricious lie.”

>In the pages of Esquire, Mark Warren charges that I “hate America” and have “taken to heart” Osama bin Laden’s view of the United States. (Warren also challenged me to a fight and threatened to put me in the hospital.) In his New York Times review of my book last week, Alan Wolfe calls my work “a national disgrace . . . either self-delusional or dishonest.” I am “a childish thinker” with “no sense of shame,” he argues. “D’Souza writes like a lover spurned; despite all his efforts to reach out to Bin Laden, the man insists on joining forces with the Satanists.”

>It goes on. The Washington Post’s Warren Bass writes that I think Jerry Falwell was “on to something” when he blamed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on pagans, gays and the ACLU. Slate’s Timothy Noah diagnoses me with “Mullah envy,” while the Nation’s Katha Pollitt calls me a “surrender monkey” and the headline to her article brands me “Ayatollah D’Souza.” And in my recent appearance on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” I had to fend off the insistent host. “But you agree with the Islamic radicals, don’t you?” Stephen Colbert asked again and again.

Let me add Michiko Kakutani from the New York Times:

>His new book, “The Enemy at Home,” is filled with willfully incendiary — and preposterous — assertions that “the cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11”; that the left is “secretly allied” with the movement that Osama bin Laden and Islamic radicals represent “to undermine the Bush administration and American foreign policy”; and that “the left wants America to be a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill.”

Part II

>Contrary to the common liberal view, I don’t believe that the 9/11 attacks were payback for U.S. foreign policy. Bin Laden isn’t upset because there are U.S. troops in Mecca, as liberals are fond of saying. (There are no U.S. troops in Mecca.) He isn’t upset because Washington is allied with despotic regimes in the region. Israel aside, what other regimes are there in the Middle East? It isn’t all about Israel. (Why hasn’t al-Qaeda launched a single attack against Israel?) The thrust of the radical Muslim critique of America is that Islam is under attack from the global forces of atheism and immorality — and that the United States is leading that attack.

Just the first claim alone ought to make one bristle. Assertions can be seen to fall into several different categories. But for the moment, let’s say that those assertions which might be labeled “liberal” or “conservative” are prescriptive ones. In other words, they are claims about what we ought to do (not get gay-married or drive fuel-efficient cars are examples of prescriptive-type claims) not about how things are (the average global temperature is rising or Bin Laden said “I hate it when you put your soldiers in the land of holy places”). The second, you might notice, are claims of fact. Claims of fact are neither liberal nor conservative.

How does this relate to the first sentence of D’Souza’s piece? It’s the placement of the adjective. He ought to have said, “many liberals claim that “the 9/11 attacks were payback for U.S. foreign policy.” After all, it’s not a “liberal view,” it’s a view held by liberals. But it’s also a view held by conservatives. It’s wrong therefore–categorically wrong–to submit a factual claim of that nature to an ideological grammar–that’s a category mistake.

Part III

>Contrary to the common liberal view, I don’t believe that the 9/11 attacks were payback for U.S. foreign policy. Bin Laden isn’t upset because there are U.S. troops in Mecca, as liberals are fond of saying. (There are no U.S. troops in Mecca.) He isn’t upset because Washington is allied with despotic regimes in the region. Israel aside, what other regimes are there in the Middle East? It isn’t all about Israel. (Why hasn’t al-Qaeda launched a single attack against Israel?) The thrust of the radical Muslim critique of America is that Islam is under attack from the global forces of atheism and immorality — and that the United States is leading that attack.

The highlighted claim (and the rest of the paragraph) suffer from factual problems (already noticed by reviewers). Warren Bass, writing in the Washington Post, writes:

>D’Souza, the author of the bestselling Illiberal Education, has no particular expertise on terrorism, which may explain why he writes twice that there are U.S. troops in Mecca (someone should probably alert Bob Gates) or why he thinks that President Reagan’s 1986 airstrikes on Libya “convinced Qadafi to retire from the terrorism trade,” despite the bombing of Pan Am 103 by Libyan agents two years later. But D’Souza’s inexperience doesn’t explain why he so badly misreads bin Ladenist ideology, despite the peppering of jihadist quotes that he uses to lend the book a sense of authority.

He’s added the allegation that liberals are responsible for the Mecca claim. Now to Bin Laden’s complaint:

>Of course, the ascetic bin Laden doesn’t like American culture or values, including such far-left ideas as democracy or educating women, but he has a clear politico-religious agenda that’s important to take seriously. You’d never know it from reading D’Souza, but bin Laden’s February 1998 “Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders” — the most considered summation of his casus belli — laid out three main grievances for which al-Qaeda kills. First and foremost comes the post-Gulf crisis deployment of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, which are “occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories” and “using its bases in the peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic peoples.” Second comes the supposed Crusader-Jewish alliance’s “long blockade” of the Iraqis, designed “to destroy what remains of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.” Finally, America’s anti-Muslim wars “also serve the petty state of the Jews, to divert attention from their occupation of Jerusalem and their killing of Muslims in it.” See anything about Hollywood there?

Facts are important.

Part IV

>Contrary to President Bush’s view, they don’t hate us for our freedom, either. Rather, they hate us for how we use our freedom. When Planned Parenthood International opens clinics in non-Western countries and dispenses contraceptives to unmarried girls, many see it as an assault on prevailing religious and traditional values. When human rights groups use their interpretation of international law to pressure non-Western countries to overturn laws against abortion or to liberalize laws regarding homosexuality, the traditional sensibilities of many of the world’s people are violated.

I thought we were talking about Bin Laden and his motivations for recruiting, funding, and inciting suicide terrorism against United States’ military, economic and political targets. But it turns out we’re talking about “their” objection to contraception, premarital sex, and homosexuality. Who are they? People with traditional values in non-Western cultures. Whether these non-Western cultures include Saudi Arabia–where women can’t drive for Chrissake–is left for the reader to conclude. And nevermind that these three things also constitute the core of the Christian right’s position against “secularism” (“how convenient!” the Church Lady might add).

But more fundamentally, while Bin Laden might object to these features of Western Culture, it doesn’t follow from that fact that these things are the features of Western Culture for which he attacked us.

Part V

>This argument has nothing to do with Falwell’s suggestion that 9/11 was God’s judgment on the ACLU and the feminists for their sins. I pose a simple question: Why did the terrorists do it? In a 2003 statement, bin Laden said that to him, the World Trade Center resembled the idols that the prophet Muhammad removed from Mecca. In other words, bin Laden believes that the United States represents the pagan depravity that Muslims have a duty to resist. The literature of radical Islam, such as the works of Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, resonates with these themes. One radical sheik even told a European television station a few years ago that although Europe is more decadent than America, the United States is the more vital target because it is U.S. culture — not Swedish culture or French culture — that is spreading throughout the world.

Notice that D’Souza expects us to make two inferences here, both of them unwarranted. First, he wants us to draw the conclusion that the World Trade Center “idols” fall into the same class as the socially progressive ideas (abortion, gay marriage and so forth) he railed against in the previous paragraph, such that an attack on the World Trade Center is an attack on these ideals. They have in common their “westernness” perhaps, but that would be such a broad class of objects that it would amount to nothing at all. But more than that, the progressive ideas D’Souza complains about don’t amount to idols to be worshiped. No one worships gay marriage. But that might, and this is only a suggestion, worship our economic (WTC) and military (the Pentagon) hegemony. There seems to be no connection, in other words, between the World Trade Center (and the Pentagon) and homosexual marriage (the Pentagon actually banned homosexuals from enlisting openly in the armed forces).

Second, D’Souza expects us to believe that Sayyid Qutb who visited the United States in the 1950s (and complained, among other the things about racism, restrictions on divorce, poor haircuts and the mixing of the sexes) and the radical sheik interviewed on European TV accurately represent bin Laden’s motivations more than bin Laden’s own pronouncements (see here for them). There is therefore a much simpler answer to the question “why they attacked us” than the one D’Souza is proposing: ask Bin Laden. He’ll tell you. Asking Sayyid Qutb, who is dead, or a radical sheik who does not represent al Qaeda, why bin Laden attacked the US on 9/11 makes about as much sense as asking Ronald Reagan why George Bush invaded Iraq.

Part VI

So far we have noticed that D’Souza’s apologia suffers from grievous logical and factual problems. And we’ve so far only looked at three paragraphs. But today’s installment is no different:

>What would motivate Muslims in faraway countries to volunteer for martyrdom? The fact that Palestinians don’t have a state? I don’t think so. It’s more likely that they would do it if they feared their values and way of life were threatened. Even as the cultural left accuses Bush of imperialism in invading Iraq, it deflects attention from its own cultural imperialism aimed at secularizing Muslim society and undermining its patriarchal and traditional values. The liberal “solution” to Islamic fundamentalism is itself a source of Islamic hostility to America.

Interpreting the motivations of others–especially warlike ones such as terrorists–is not an easy thing to do. But it’s certainly the case that one cannot do it a priori, as D’Souza has done. “I don’t think so” in other words, does not an argument make. It may be the case that it’s more likely that they would attack us if they felt their way of life was threatened, but that’s not something you can just assert without any evidence. Aside from that, D’Souza excludes the Israel issue by narrowly framing the question. In other words, the Palestinians’ not having a state might not have mattered or matter to Bin Laden and company in that specific sense, but that doesn’t mean that Israel isn’t for them a major source of complaint. In fact, has Bin Laden and the suicide hijackers have said as much. Here’s what the 9/11 Commission Report says:

>In his interactions with other students, Atta voiced virulently anti-Semitic and anti-American opinions, ranging from condemnations of what he described as a global Jewish movement centered in New York City that supposedly controlled the financial world and the media, to polemics against governments of the Arab world. To him, Saddam Hussein was an American stooge set up to give Washington an excuse to intervene in the Middle East (section 5.3).

Nothing about the Palestinians’ statehood. But that doesn’t make D’Souza’s claim any less false.