More D'Souza

by: Chet Scoville

In his latest WaPo column, Dinesh D'Souza whines about how mean everyone's being, just because he effectively accused his fellow Americans of treason. His column is deeply dishonest. For example (all emphases mine):

Why the onslaught? Just this: In my book, published this month, I argue that the American left bears a measure of responsibility for the volcano of anger from the Muslim world that produced the 9/11 attacks.

But that's not what D'Souza argues in his book. What he says is this:

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 .... without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.

Notice the exact claim at the outset of the book: D'Souza does not make the more modest claim that he sketches in his WaPo column. He claims, explicitly, that the American left caused 9/11 itself, and indeed that without it, 9/11 "would not have happened" -- that the "cultural left," in other words, was the necessary and sufficient precondition for 9/11. His exact position, as he has stated it, is that nothing else can really be said to be responsible, not American foreign policy, not global economics, not the complexities of centuries of historical rivalries, not even (and isn't this the obvious one?) wrongful actions taken by the 9/11 attackers.

Elsewhere, he does address the more generalized phenomenon of anti-American anger, but not in the way that his column claims he does:

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 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.

Again, that's not an accusation of "a measure of responsibility" for the generalized phenomenon of anti-American anger that led to 9/11; it's an accusation of primary and active responsibility for the generalized phenomenon and of directly and uniquely causing the event itself. There's a world of difference between the two. The former can be described as an accusation of unrealized error, of being one unwitting factor in the causes of unjustified blowback. The latter is nothing more or less than a thinly veiled accusation of treason.

If D'Souza had meant to say "a measure of responsibility," then he should have said that. But as it is, he did not say that, and it's no good making a walkback now. If people are calling him on a clumsily articulated, overreaching, and dishonest argument, he's got only himself to blame.

A bit later on in the column, D'Souza claims:

This argument has nothing to do with [Jerry] Falwell's suggestion that 9/11 was God's judgment on the ACLU and the feminists for their sins.

Yet in his book, D'Souza does not say that his argument has nothing to do with Falwell's. In fact, he explicitly states that Falwell had a point. He writes this:

These words are not insightful in the theological sense that Falwell intended....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.

In other words, the only thing that D'Souza thinks Falwell got wrong was the God part. The blaming-us part, which is the part that Falwell rightly got condemned for, well, D'Souza's right on board with that. When he claims to distance himself from Falwell's position, he's fooling nobody but himself.

Cross-posted at The Vanity Press.