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Mr. Dinesh D'Souza Robert and Karen Rishwain Fellow Hoover Institution
 Dinesh D'Souza - Employment- Robert and Karen Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; former John M. Olin fellow, American Enterprise Institute; senior domestic policy analyst, Reagan Administration (1987-88). Works- Author, The Enemy at Home, Letters to a Young Conservative, What's So Great About America, The Virtue of Prosperity, Ronald Reagan, The End of Racism, and Illiberal Education. Special Mention- Author of many articles on culture and politics which have appeared in Vanity Fair, Forbes, Harper's, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post and New York Times; has made many television appearances on the Today Show, Nightline, The News Hour, The O'Reilly Factor, Moneyline, . Education- Graduate of Dartmouth College, Phi Beta Kappa. Personal- Lives in Stanford, California.and Hannity and Colmes
"The Enemy at Home"
Thank you very much. It is always a great privilege and a great honor to be here at CNP.
I know my time is very limited, and so in my opening remarks, I will try to adopt the motto that King Henry VIII used with one of his wives. He said, "I won't keep you long."
[Laughter.]
MR. D'SOUZA: We are in a very strange new kind of war that I want to suggest requires a new kind of understanding. In some ways, there has been this debate now about reconsidering Iraq. I don't think we can understand where we are or how we should move ahead without taking a little bit of a fresh look at 9/11, because many of our concepts about the war developed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
We have been talking, for example, for five years now or the better part of five years about America fighting a war on terror, a war against terrorism, but I think in some ways, America is no more fighting a war against terrorism now than America was fighting a war against kamikazism during World War II. No. In World War II, who was the enemy? The armies of Imperial Japan. Kamikazism was only the tactic or the strategy employed by the enemy.
Similarly now, it is not so much a war against terrorism. It is a war against what? Islamic radicalism, some people say Islamic fundamentalism, but we should be a little bit careful about these terms. Fundamentalism is an idea that comes out of Protestant Christianity. It is not a very useful term to superimpose onto another religion, another culture and so on.
These days, you can turn on the television, and you will see a retired analyst for CNN say the Muslim world is divided between the liberals and the fundamentalists. Now, I don't know if you have noticed, but there are no liberals in the Muslim world.
Look, one can always find an isolated individual here or there, but liberalism in the modern sense. I am not talking about the classical liberalism of the American Founders. The modern liberalism that we see today has no constituency in any Muslim country.
Yes, we can find individuals, Salman Rushdie and so on. Someone said to me the other day, "But aren't there Iranians who are secular and feminist and believe in gay marriage?" I said, "Yeah, but they live in L.A."
[Laughter.]
MR. D'SOUZA: Now, my book, which is called The Enemy at Home, has stirred up some controversy and some even on the right. It is subtitled: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.
Now, obviously, I am not suggesting that the Left did 9/11. I am not suggesting the left knocked over the World Trade Center or attacked the Pentagon. No.
The question I am asking is a little different one. It would be a little bit like this. In the 1930s, it was Hitler who invaded Poland, it was Hitler who invaded France, but you might ask was European appeasement in the 1930s responsible for strengthening the rise of Hitler, helping him consolidate his power, emboldening him to attack and the confidence that he could get away with it.
So, similarly of 9/11, the radical Muslims did it, but the important question is what made them strong enough to think about this? How could they conceive of an attack and believe that they could conduct it with impunity?
Now, in a sense, I think when we look at this, the left has been blaming American foreign policy for sowing the seeds of resentment, what one leftist writer calls a "blowback of rage coming from the Muslim world." In other words, American foreign policy has helped to create this volcano of Muslim anger.
In a sense, my book turns the tables on the left and says to them, "You know what, there is an element of truth in what you say, but it is not America that is to blame. It is liberal foreign policy and liberal cultural values projected abroad that have helped to create this problem."
[Applause.]
MR. D'SOUZA: Now, here is what I mean by this. If you go back in history a little bit, the radical Muslims have been around since the 1920s, but for a long time, they were a small minority. They were handing out flyers, shouting in the Mosque. They didn't have any power.
One of their leaders, the Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb says, "Listen, we can do this all day. We will never get anywhere until we get out hands on a major state." In 1979, the radical Muslims got their hands on a major state which was Iran.
Now, how did that happen? When Jimmy Carter was elected in '76, he had campaigned on human rights, and his leftist advisor said to him, "President Carter, how can you say that you are for human rights? Here we are allied with the Shah who is a tyrant. He has a secret police. You should pull the Persian rug out from under him," and so America began to withdraw its support of the Shah, and in trying to get rid of the bad guy, we got the worst guy, Khomeini.
And Khomeini was the inventor of modern Islamic radicalism. If you think back, he is the first Muslim leader to say "America is the Great Satan." He is the first guy to call for a worldwide Jihad of Muslims to kill themselves in a battle against the Great Satan, which is us.
Now I want to fast‑forward a little bit to the 1990s and raise a question that hasn't really been looked at very much, I don't think, and that is that after the cold war ended, the Islamic radicals all went back to their home countries. Bin Laden went back to Saudi Arabia. His deputy, al‑Zawahiri went back to Egypt. They were fighting to overthrow what they called "the near enemy," which is their own governments, but then they made a very fateful shift of strategy and decided to attack the far enemy, which is the United States.
And very few people have asked this question: Why did these guys change their mind? Why did they target us when, for a long time, they were fighting their own governments to overthrow them and establish Muslim holy law in that part of the world? What made them think that they could attack the world's sole super power if you cannot defeat Musharraf in Pakistan or Mubarak in Egypt? What makes you think you can take on the United States?
Well, bin Laden says he had an idea. After the success of the Arab Afghans, the Muslims in pushing the Soviets out of Afghanistan, he said, "It suddenly occurred to me that maybe the United States is not so tough. Maybe the United States is outwardly tough, but inwardly very brittle, very weak, and if you kick the United States repeatedly in the shins, it will turn around and run."
Now, in the 1990s, the radical Muslims launched a series of test strikes against America to, in a sense, examine American resolve. They bombed the Cobar Towers facility in '95. They bombed our embassies in East Africa in '98. There was a suicide attack on the USS Cole in 2000.
Now, on every occasion, the Clinton administration, for whatever reason, did little or nothing. I mean, in one case, there was a sort of perfunctory attack, but it was so ineffective that it confirmed the radical Muslims in their suspicion of American pusillanimity, American cowardice, and bin Laden says himself, "This emboldened us to envision a grander strike; in a sense, an attack on American shores," which is, I believe, the one we suffered on 9/11.
Now, having said a word about foreign policy, I want to turn to another issue that I think has gotten submerged or ignored a little bit, and let me describe it in this way. In trying to think about this war, there are many people, even on the right, who see it as a clash of civilizations, us against them, it is the west against the Muslim world, and there is a grain of truth in this. However, it is important to remember that there is a clash of civilizations that is going on within the west, and there is another clash of civilizations that is going on within the Muslim world.
In the west, for example, look at the divisions between the United States and some of our traditional allies in Europe. Look at the divisions within this country over not only the war, but over the meaning of America itself, and I want to argue that there is an equally significant clash in the Muslim world.
I have been reading some recent books that have been coming out from prominent atheist writers, and in a sense, they have an interesting argument that is worth thinking about. What they say is that this war is a war of competing fundamentalisms, Islamic fundamentalism on this side, Christian fundamentalism on this side, and they say what both these fundamentalisms have in common is religious fanaticism. Both the fundamentalisms allegedly fuel their fanaticism at the same holy gas station, and according to this view, the problem is not only fundamentalism in general, but religion in general. Religion ultimately caused this problem. Religion explains why everybody is fighting in the world. One leftist writer described 9/11 as a "faith‑based initiative."
So what is the solution in this view? Secularism. Get rid of religion everywhere, or at least banish it from the public square. Secularize the Muslim world, and make sure that our society is as secular as possible. It is this idea that I want to examine very briefly this morning.
I think what is interesting is that if you look at it from the Muslim side and spend, as I have the past three years, looking at America through Muslim eyes, look at the thinkers of radical Islam, something very striking comes to your attention, and that is that the radical Muslims never portray America as a religious or a Christian society. Never. The main thrust of their rhetoric is to accuse America of being a pagan society, an atheist society, what bin Laden calls the "global head of the unbelievers."
Now, the reason this is very important is it gets to the motivation of how the radical Muslims recruit in their part of the world. See, for a long time, people say the radical Muslims are complaining about American foreign policy, but are you telling me that an ordinary Muslim in the Sudan or Somalia or Pakistan is willing to go to his death because the Palestinians don't have a state? I find that a little hard to believe, and if you look at the rhetoric of radical Islam, that is not what they focus on. What they are doing is they are going to the ordinary Muslim and saying to them, "Listen, Islam is under attack. Your religion is under siege. That America, which is not a Christian, but a pagan society, wants to come to your part of the world, destroy your religion, undermine your values, destroy the Muslim family, and corrupt the innocence of the Muslim children."
Now, the reason this is an important theme is not because we want to persuade the radical Muslims. I think our main mode of communication with them has to be through live ammunition.
[Applause.]
MR. D'SOUZA: We are not going to talk sense into them, but what is very important here is that the radical Muslims are fishing in the pool of the traditional Muslims. The radical Muslims are going to the ordinary Muslim and seducing them to their cause, and their main propaganda is to portray America as an atheist and an immoral society.
I saw a very interesting interview with a Muslim sheikh on a European TV station, and the interviewer asked him. She said, "Listen, this is very interesting. You keep pointing to America as the Great Satan," but the interviewer said, "Europe is much more secular than America. Europe is much more decadent than America. Look at all the pornography in European society. Why is America your main target?" The Muslim sheikh laughed, and he said, "Well, it's very obvious. It is because it is American values and American culture that are spreading so effectively and promiscuously throughout the world." In other words, the ordinary Muslim in Riyadh or Cairo isn't trying to crack Swedish jokes or go to French films. They are influenced by the great power of American culture.
Now, the point about American culture is the following. That you and I, living here in America, we see some of the excesses of American culture, and they certainly are there, but we are in a position to contrast American popular culture and some of its values with the way Americans actually live. But the point is that for Muslims living in other parts of the world ‑‑ and not just the Muslims. I have been traveling a fair amount in Asia lately, and there is a big theme that is going across Asia now which is modernization without westernization.
You see in countries like Singapore and China and India and so on, this idea, that "We want western technology, we want western prosperity, but some of the values that we see in western culture, no. We want to block those from entering our society."
So what I am getting at here is that these countries are getting, if you will, in my view, a bit of a distorted picture of America. Why? Because the only America they see are the values of our popular culture.
I talked to my mom who lives in Bombay, and in fact, when she came to visit me recently, I took her to a local Catholic church, and she was shocked. She said, "The parking lot is full," and I said, "So?" She gets her idea of America by watching American movies and American TV programs, and think about it. In American TV programs, when do Americans ever go to church? In an American movie, if you have two people having sex, they are never married, or if they are, not to each other. So my point is that these values are the face of America as they are seen by many people in other cultures, and the radical Muslims exploit this.
Now, here is where I am going with all of this. In a sense, it seems to me we cannot win the war on terror without driving a wedge between radical Islam and traditional Islam. The reason this is very important is we often look at the Muslim world, and we say the main division in the Muslim world is between the Wahhabis and everybody else, or it is between the Shia and the Sunni, but it is important to realize that Islamic radicalism has come out of all those streams of Islam. That is not the critical distinction as far as we are concerned.
Yes, many of the 9/11 hijackers may have been radicalized in the Wahhabi strain of Saudi Arabia, but Iran is a Shia country. Hezbollah derives its fanaticism from Shia Islam. Hamas is predominantly Sunni, and so is al‑Qaeda. The insurgents in Iraq are Sunni.
So my point is Islamic radicalism is emerging from all these major strains. The real division in the Muslim world is not this sort of denominational division. It is between radical Muslims and traditional Muslims. The traditional Muslims are the people who have practiced Islam the way it has been now for 1,300 years, and my point is the radical Muslims have been growing in strength, so strong that they can now win free elections, as we have seen with Hamas, as we have seen with the Muslim Brotherhood's electoral victories in Egypt. The reason they can win these victories is they are successfully recruiting among the traditional Muslims.
It doesn't matter if you kill a thousand radical Muslims if 10,000 traditional Muslims join their cause the next month. We have to find a way of separating these two camps and, ultimately, allying, if I may say, with traditional Islam against radical Islam.
I want to say a final word, if I may, about Iraq and about this issue of the enemy at home. In looking at the Iraq war, it seems to me the great danger is committing the Iran mistake all over again. I don't deny that it is a difficult situation in Iraq, but again, in trying to get rid of a bad situation, it seems to me that the democratic leadership is risking getting us a worse situation.
We keep hearing all of these analogies to Vietnam, but when the Vietnam war ended, while it was very bad for the people over there, big blood bath in Indochina, it didn't affect us all that much over here.
The Middle East is different. I spent some time debating on the college campus, and it is amazing what an unreal world people live in about this because they don't recognize that our basic security and for the foreseeable future, our way of life, is implicated in the Middle East.
I was talking to a professor the other day, and he says, "Mr. D'Souza, would you admit that oil is an important determinant of our foreign policy? That the reason the United States is in the Middle East is for reasons of oil?" I said to him, "I certainly hope so. I can't think of other reasons to be over there, can you?" In other words, we need a little bit of realism in our foreign policy. Everywhere in the world, it is taken for granted that countries act in their self‑interest. It is only in this country that you have to somehow apologize for this.
My point is this. The radical Muslims already control Iran, and we know how dangerous that is. They are very eager to get their hands on Iraq. They have already said that if they do, they will target Egypt, they will target Saudi Arabia. So this, it seems to me, is not a war that we can afford to lose.
Now, are we, in fact, losing it? Here is the point I want to make about this. If you think about the war from the point of view of an Iraqi insurgent, you are facing a very formidable situation. First of all, the insurgency is drawing from a tiny minority of the population, the Sunni. They are facing the Shia and the Kurds and then American wealth and power and technology and military training. So, if you are an insurgent, the situation looks pretty grim. This is not a war you can easily win, but then a realization hits you, you don't have to win it. You merely have to hang in there a little longer, ratchet up, if you will, the violins, and why? Because you are waiting for the great impatience of the American people to kick in, and you are waiting for the left, the left in American which was once on the margin of politics, but is now whispering every day in the ears of Pelosi and Rangel and Murtha and Kennedy to convince the Americans to pack up the tent and move out.
In other words, what the insurgents cannot possibly hope to achieve on their own, they can't make videos and say "America go home," but they don't have to make the videos. To their unbelievable good fortune, there is a political wing in America that is working overtime to achieve that goal, and so this is what I mean by the enemy at home, not any kind of conspiracy, but from the point of view of the enemy, the war on terror will be won from their point of view not so much in Baghdad as in Washington, or from our point of view, we are in danger of losing Iraq not over there, but one may say very honestly over here.
[Applause.]
MR. D'SOUZA: So I think if we wake up to this, we can develop a better strategy to fight this war.
Let me end, if I may, with those words from the 1960s: If not now, when? If not us, who?
Thank you very much.
[Applause.]
MODERATOR: Thank you very much, Dinesh.
I think you can see why Dinesh is very widely acclaimed as one of the sharpest and most creative conservative thinkers we have on the right, right now.
We have time for one quick question before we introduce Rebecca who has got 12 more reports to get through. In the back there.
ATTENDEE: [Inaudible.]
MR. D'SOUZA: The question is: Ultimately, aren't the radical Muslims right? And I want to answer that question this way: No. But here is a paradox of anti‑Americanism that I sort of discovered when I was working on my last book called "What's So Great About America?" And that is, you have anti‑Americanism, but it comes from opposite directions.
If you go to Europe, Germany or France, you find a guy who hates America, "Why do you hate America?" Basically, what they say is, "Oh, America is a terrible place. You've got all those wacky fundamentalists running around, praying in tongues and so on. You've got this cowboy in the White House, shoot first, ask questions later." So the Europeans look at America, and they see Red America, and anti‑Americanism comes out of their objection to Conservative America.
Then you go to Asia or Africa or the Muslim world, and you find anti‑Americanism, and you say why, and the answer is totally different. They say, "Oh, gosh. Look at America. The family is in a state of breakdown, and religion has been banished from the culture, and the popular values are so trivial and debased and disgusting and vulgar." So, in some ways, while the Europeans look at America and all they see is Red America, the Muslims look at America, and all they see is Blue America, Liberal America.
Now, this is a debate that is going on within our country, but what I am saying is that the culture war in America and the war on terror are connected, and that liberal values are the main Exhibit A that the radical Muslims use to point to American depravity.
Now, I am not saying we should change our way of life here to appease the Mullahs. Of course not, but I am saying that as a matter of our diplomacy ‑‑ and we can do this pretty effectively ‑‑ let's show the rest of the world the other America. Let's show them the traditional America that they never see on television, they never see in the movies, the Americans who go to church and support their families and work hard and live by traditional values. The major religions of the world disagree about theology, but there is quite a bit of common ground on morality, and I think we should use the international stage in effective ways as conservatives to oppose the exportation by Europe and by the left in America of decadent values abroad.
This is happening. My book, "The Enemy at Home," documents this. It is not just a matter of Britney Spears and pop culture. It is at the left, through the NGOs, through its organizations as a very determined campaign to promote abortion, homosexuality, pornography, prostitution as a human right and as a worker's right. This stuff is going on aggressively abroad.
Some of it is pretty uncontroversial in the west. If you go on a college campus and start handing out condoms, people say, "Oh, yeah. Safe sex. You are doing a wonderful thing," and so on, but you go to any Muslim country, as Planned Parenthood does, and hand out condoms to unmarried girls, I am not just talking about Saudi Arabia. You go try it in Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Turkey. You will have a riot on your hands.
So my point is while the left accuses Bush or foreign policy imperialism, it has its own project of cultural imperialism that it is pushing abroad. We need to expose that, and that will help us find some allies in the Muslim world.
Thank you.
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