Update: 3/15/07 - Robert Spencer, for whom I have enormous respect, has been carrying on a debate with D'Souza for some time now. You can follow Spencer's rebuttals at his blog Jihad Watch and D'Souza's counter-responses here. The nub of it seems to be: D'Souza thinks critics of Islam should stop criticizing Islam because it foments tensions. Spencer quotes texts that Islamists use to justify jihad saying in effect, "Here is the problem that you, D'Souza, refuse to acknowledge. It's written in the sacred texts." To be specific, Spencer says:
What I have actually called for, and will keep calling for, is for Muslims to confront the fact that bin Laden and Zawahri and the late Zarqawi and Mukhlas Imron and so many other jihadists are justifying their violence by reference to passages of the Qur'an and the words and deeds of Muhammad. If they don't confront this and formulate new and non-literalist ways of understanding this material, it will continue to be used to incite violence. In other words, the use that jihadists make of elements of the Qur'an and Muhammad's teaching makes it incumbent upon peaceful Muslims to perform a searching reevaluation of how they understand those elements, so as to neutralize their capacity to set Muslims against non-Muslims.
And I will not, now or ever, apologize for calling for that.
Read the two blogs, and be sure to read Spencer's post here. It should be noted that D'Souza has printed four articles defending himself against his critics (and in which he criticizes Spencer and others).
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Three weeks ago I offered a lengthy post on Dinesh D'Souza's new book The Enemy At Home. In that post I quoted conservatives who take serious issue with D'Souza's analysis of the cause of Muslim radicalism and how we can meet the challenge (see the post for details). In an interview published today, D'Souza offers a response, a few paragraphs of which follow:
Q: What's your battle plan for how you'd want conservatives at home to use the culture war to win the war against Islamic radicalism?
A: First of all, conservatives need to do their best to block the project of liberal cultural imperialism that is trying to promote secularism, feminism, gay rights and all the rest of it, on the traditional world. This is already producing a huge backlash, not just in the Muslim world, but even in South America, Africa and Asia. I came back recently from a trip to Singapore and India, and the big slogan in Asia today is "Modernization yes, Americanization no," reflecting that
these are traditional cultures. Yes, they are kind of patriarchal and they abide by traditional values. So what the left is doing abroad is seen as a real assault on the values that the ordinary people live by.
Radical Islam has exploited this. The ordinary Muslim on the streets of Islamabad or Riyadh -- are you telling me that the guy is willing to go to his death because the Palestinians don't have a state? I don't believe it. I think the guy is mobilized because some mullah is telling him, "Your religion is in danger. These Americans want to corrupt your religion and destroy your family and erode the innocence of your daughter." This is the kind of thing that hits the ordinary fellow in the gut and gives him a motive to strike back and fight back. I think this dimension of why they hate us, if you will, has gone totally ignored.
Conservatives are sort of taken by surprise and so I think they are reacting in a very foolish and irrational way to my book, which actually is just making a novel conservative argument. I agree it’s different than the prevailing orthodoxy, but there’s no reason to be jumping out of windows. (more)