How the left caused 9/11, by Dinesh D'Souza

An interview with the conservative polemicist, who accuses the cultural left of provoking al-Qaida's attack in his new book, "The Enemy at Home."

By Alex Koppelman

Read more: Ronald Reagan, Politics, Jimmy Carter, Saddam Hussein, News, Bush, Islam, Osama Bin Laden, Stephen Colbert, Alex Koppelman

Jan. 20, 2007 | For almost 20 years, Dinesh D'Souza has been a prominent force in the conservative intelligentsia, writing such provocative books as "Illiberal Education," an attack on multiculturalism, and "The End of Racism," which blasts affirmative action. Today, the former senior policy analyst for the Reagan administration is the Robert and Karen Rishwain Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank.

In his new book, "The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11," D'Souza argues that "The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11 ... the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the non-profit sector and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world." On Tuesday, during an appearance on Comedy Central's "Colbert Report," D'Souza was prodded by host Stephen Colbert into admitting that he agrees "with some of the things that these radical extremists [who attacked the United States on 9/11] are against in America."

D'Souza's theory has caused, as might be expected, a little consternation. Reviewing the book for the New York Times, political scientist Alan Wolfe wrote that "decent conservatives and Republicans ... will, if they have any sense of honor, distance themselves, quickly and cleanly, from [D'Souza.]" Slate's Timothy Noah accused D'Souza of "libeling" both the American left and the American right.

Salon spoke with D'Souza on Thursday.

What's the book about?

Well, the book began as a sort of postmortem on 9/11 and an effort to trace the causes of 9/11. My thinking was that five years after 9/11, it's not unreasonable to look back at that pivotal event and say, 'How did that come about?' Right after 9/11 there was, as you know, a moment of national unity in which the whole American tribe came together, and the basic idea was, we don't care who did this, or why: We basically want to pulverize the people who did this. And that was a very understandable response, but I think with a little distance, I wanted to look back at 9/11, also partly because I felt that ... the debate over the war on terror had sort of reached a standstill; the debate had become almost sterile. So I wanted to, from a conservative but independent view, turn all the assumptions into questions and go back to the drawing board so that I could understand not just 9/11 but also our current political debate.

And what was the answer you came up with?

Well, that 9/11 has both a foreign-policy dimension and a cultural dimension that have not been recognized. For example, on the foreign-policy side for a moment, a crucial event leading up to 9/11 was the Islamic radicals gaining control of the state of Iran. So then the question, of course, is how did they get that state?

Well, I think part of it is a horrendous blunder of American foreign policy, perhaps the most serious since World War II, which is that Jimmy Carter came to power, [and] he said, 'I believe in human rights,' and the left basically got around Carter and said, if you believe in human rights, then you can't support the shah, the shah of Iran is a dictator, he has a secret police, and so Jimmy Carter was encouraged and pressured to withdraw American support for the shah, which he did ... In trying to get rid of the lesser evil, we got the greater evil. That's one small way in which the left sowed the seeds of 9/11.

The cultural seeds are somewhat different, and that is that the radical Muslims have been able to stir up a lot of hatred against America by saying, in effect, Islam is under attack. If you think about it, that's really the rallying cry of Islamic radicalism, and that's the only believable motive for why large numbers of people from a wide range of countries would be willing to risk their lives to strike out against America. I simply refuse to believe that people in Pakistan and Somalia would go to their deaths because the Palestinians don't have a state. So this idea that America is against your religion and is out to destroy your religion and your values, and undermine the Muslim family, and corrupt the innocence of young people and Muslim girls -- this is a very powerful attack, because it's not in the abstract realm of politics -- it affects the ordinary Muslim in his everyday life.

You told Stephen Colbert that you "agree with some of the things that these radical extremists are against in America." What are those things?

Well, put it this way -- if what the radical Muslims said was totally wrong, it would not convince anybody. An argument only works if it contains some element of truth. I mean, when the Soviet Union, and here you have an extreme form of propaganda, basically said, "Capitalism generates shameless inequality, and we will liberate the proletariat," there was a lot of distortion in there. But there was also a grain of truth. That's why so many people, not just in the Soviet Union, but many people in the West, were attracted to the socialist idea, because even if it was a wrong solution, its critique did contain a grain of truth.

OK, but what do you agree with?

I'm telling you. When the radical Muslims say that "if we were to import, if we were to embrace this American culture" -- which, by the way, I want to emphasize is not the way Americans live, but our popular culture as it is projected abroad -- "if we were to embrace the values of this culture, it would, (a) undermine belief in Allah, (b) destroy the Muslim family, and (c) corrupt the innocence of Muslim girls and Muslim children," I think that they're right about that. It would.

So in that sense, when they say that Islam is under attack and that, not American values, but these American values that are being globally pushed by the left, the values of, I mean, you have left-wing organizations filing lawsuits all over South America to liberalize abortion laws. These are democratically passed laws in Catholic countries, but under the bogus rubric of international law, there's an effort here to overturn these democratically passed laws in the name of some notion of abortion as an international right. Again, you have Planned Parenthood distributing contraceptives to Muslim girls.

My point is how can you justify this sort of thing? Isn't it true that when the radical Muslims say, "This is an effort to corrupt our morality," they have a point? That's why radical Islam has been able to recruit so successfully from traditional Islam. So it's simply blind of us not to see that as a serious problem.

Have you ever read bin Laden's 1998 fatwa calling for jihad against Americans, the one in which he lays out his case against America?

I think I've read every public statement by bin Laden, and studied it carefully.

How does that one, the 1998 fatwa, fit in with your thesis about the left and pop culture causing 9/11?

Well, [laughs] the reviews mention this, and it's sheer foolishness. Bin Laden declared war on America in 1996. His 1998 fatwa was issued at a time when the radical Muslims were launching foreign attacks against American targets abroad, and here I'm thinking of things like the bombing of the embassies and the bombing of the Cole. So bin Laden's critique at that point was focused on foreign-policy issues, I agree, but the important point is not that.

The important point is when bin Laden struck on 9/11, then he issued, almost immediately after that, his Letter to America, in 2002, in which he very clearly, and in a detailed way, spelled out his indictment against America. And I agree there's some part of that indictment that includes foreign policy, but if you read it, you'll see that probably about half of it, if not more, is about, he mentions gambling, adultery, fornication, prostitution, undermining the family. America is the font of atheism in the world, the head of the snake, the head of the unbelievers and so on. So it's impossible to deny that this idea that America is an atheist and a pagan society that is inflicting its values on the world is an important element of their critique. And so anyone who says, "Oh, no, this is just about the troops in Mecca," or "just about the Palestinians," I think is taking a very limited and shortsighted view and cherry-picking a particular bin Laden letter that gives a distorted picture of his overall motives.

I'm looking at the Letter to America, right now, actually. It's about 4,000 words long.

OK, I'm just going to look at the quotes in it that I quote in my chapter, because I don't have the letter in front of me. Go ahead.

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