The cultural Left is responsible for causing 9/11.

The cultural Left is responsible for causing 9/11

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Here are a few quotations from a new book by Dinesh D’Souza entitled The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. Dinesh D’Souza is the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Here are a few quotations from the book as reported in the NYT book review by Michiko Kakutani:

“…the cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11…”

“…the left wants America to be a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill…”

The American prisons in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib “are comparable to the accommodations in midlevel Middle Eastern hotels…”

“Lynndie England and Charles Graner were two wretched individuals from red America who were trying to act out the fantasies of blue America.”

“…the left is the primary reason for Islamic anti-Americanism as well as the anti-Americanism of other traditional cultures around the world” because “liberals defend and promote values that are controversial in America and deeply revolting to people in traditional societies, especially in the Muslim world.”

“…liberals tend to emphasize the negative and take genuine relish in the failures of American foreign policy.”

He calls “Secular Warriors” people who are “trying to eradicate every public trace of the religious and moral values that most of the world lives by.”

Finally, he claims that freedom in America “has come to be defined by its grossest abuses.”

His list of “domestic insurgents” includes the following:

Michael Moore
Noam Chomsky
Hilary Rodham Clinton
Robert Byrd
Jimmy Carter
Garry Wills
Seymour Hersh

I take little notice of those who make a clean demarcation between ‘left’ and ‘right’. They make out that people can be understood by simply placing them into one of two categories denoted by an abstract concept. Writers like that have an axe to grind rather than engage in any serious contribution to the issue. But unfortunately vague abstract concepts work on those who are driven by hatred rather than rational enquiry.

Would that more people thought like you. But this guy isn’t your average hate-mongering crack-pot. Check this out: hoover.org/bios/dsouza

Tell me, does the author simply accept the 9/11 Commission’s version of events as accurate?

I loathe Billary Clinton and Gnome Chomsky, but for different reasons.

The very idea of a primarily ideologically motivated push behind the 9/11 attacks really doesn’t make sense if you really look at the situation. I addressed it a little in this thread

There are sound materialist reasons for attacking America and it has more to do with the aftermath of the Afghan-Soviet War and how American handled that. And there is plenty of blame to spread around with respect to that.

As a side-note, I also think that this cartoonist has a good point. He links this comment to another polical blog, so if you want to follow back to the source, follow the link in the link. You know the game.

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felix, IMO you’ll get a better understanding of what led to 9/11 by reading John Perkins than you will by reading Dinesh D’Souza.

I’m quite familiar with the Goering quote.

But I fail to see the connection in this case. Do enlighten me.

Edit:

Ahhh! That’s what two litres of beer after a night of drinking will do to ya.

My bad.

:smiley:

You take it easy on those bottles. They’re smarter than you might think.

Except in Holland. Here people think; Oh? well, they must have a good reason for attacking us. Let’s welcome them, we might learn something from them. Like why they are attacking us.

It isn’t just that the bottles made me dumb (though they do have that effect as well), but they also make me more likely to post before I’ve actually thought anything out.

Which makes me functionally very very dumb. Thankfully, the next morning everything is more-or-less back as it should be.

Well, there are of course a few people in the UK who think like that. Would you say this view is dominant in Holland, or just widespread?

I don’t think it’s really a view people have when there’s nothing going on aggression wise, but an instinct (intellectual) people lapse into when something actually happens. I think it is a result of the endless tredmill of criticsm, counter criticism and compensation, couter counter criticism and counter compensation, etcetera. We always seek to balance things out instead of having a win/lose situation, we call it ‘poldermodel’. I don’t know the english word for polder, it’s where they make water into land.

02.18.07.1936

…and the evidence for this reasoning is…?

Funny, I thought that’s what the religious right were trying to make this country, and the rest of the world at the same time. Such amusing hypocrisy…

What does Guantanamo Bay have to do with the liberals in America? To go further, let us ask… who was in control of this country when Guatanamo was first used as a Muslim detainment center?

I don’t know who those people are (not interested in doing the research right now), so I don’t care. What do they have to do with 9-11 anyway? What the hell is this crap about a blue America fantasy? It is a documented fact that higher crime rates exist in red states than blue states… what does the religious right have to say about that?

I don’t remember any military force under the command of a Democratic President invading a Muslim-controlled country IN THE MIDDLE EAST (Hah, Somolia doesn’t count!). It is much more reasonable to postulate that Islamic anti-Americanism has been fueled by the pomp of the religious right. The hatred of Muslims for Americans is religion-driven… as the majority of America is Christian, a Muslim, by default, should hate Americans… for not accepting the Will of Allah and the authority of his “prophet”.

I would be happy to hear about anything GOOD Bush has done for this country… at that point I can rest assured in the knowledge that he wasn’t a COMPLETE waste of time and money… and American blood.

Wow… such weird thinking… Where did he get that one I wonder? How about the efforts of “religious warriors” to undermine the Constitution, and disrupt the progress of humankind throughout the world for the righteous cause of Jesus Christ. Heh… see how easy it is to make crazy stuff up? (Except there’s some truth to what I just said.) I’d like to see him prove his case for the aims of these “secular warriors”…

Defined by who? The religious right… right?

How about this idea… how about we split the country between the red and the blue and see which one becomes the most progressive in 100 years? I can probably guarantee you it will be the Blue America.

What did any of those people do to make 9-11 happen? I’m not saying I’m fans of them… I just want to know if there’s any corroborable evidence against them…

…propagandist whore.

Dude, out of context these quotations don’t say much. You should summarize the argument. Further, there are douche bags on both sides. Some people don’t really believe in ideals on either side, they just want to be on the side that wins.

I included a link to a website that provides plenty of context. But here’s another sample of Mr. D’Souza’s thinking. By the way, I thought it would be obvious that I disagree with D’Souza’s thinking which I find outrageous in it’s divisiveness. Any way here’s article by D’Souza:

Pelosi’s crew and Osama bin Laden share common goal
Dinesh D’Souza

Sunday, January 21, 2007

The Pelosi Democrats sometimes appear to be just as eager as Osama bin Laden for President Bush to lose his war on terror. Why do I say this? Because if the Pelosi Democrats were seeking Bush’s success, then their rhetoric and actions now and over the past three years are pretty much incomprehensible. By contrast, if you presume that they want Bush’s war on terror to fail, then their words and behavior make perfect sense.

Shortly before the November election, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi spoke about the American effort to capture or kill bin Laden. “Even if he is caught tomorrow, it’s five years too late,” she said. “He has done more damage the longer he has been out there. But in fact, the damage that he has done is done. And even to capture him now I don’t think makes us any safer.”

From the point of view of new House Speaker Pelosi and her fellow liberal Democrats, bin Laden today is, well, a small problem.

Listen to Pelosi and her colleagues on the left speaking about Bush, however, and it’s clear they regard him as a very big problem.

Sen. Robert Byrd compares Bush to Hermann Goering and the Nazis. Hillary Clinton accuses him of “turning back the clock on the 20th century … systematically weakening the democratic tradition. … There has never been an administration more intent upon consolidating and abusing power.” Sen. Ted Kennedy charges that “no president in America’s history has done more damage to our country than George W. Bush.”

What emerges from these comments is the indignation gap – the vastly different level of emotion that leftists and liberals employ in treating bin Laden and his allies as opposed to Bush and his allies. First there is the ritual qualification. “I’m no fan of bin Laden” or “Bin Laden is not a very nice guy.” Having gotten these hedges out of the way, the leftist proceeds to lambaste Bush and the conservatives with uncontrolled ferocity.

Something very strange is going on here, and nobody seems willing to call it what it is. Pelosi is championing a congressional resolution strongly opposing Bush’s plan to send more troops to Iraq. “There’s not a carte blanche, a blank check for him to do whatever he wishes there,” she said. A Bush spokesman, Alex Conant, welcomed Pelosi’s participation in the debate and said, “We’re glad the speaker wants us to succeed in Iraq.”

This is typical Washington doubletalk. What Conant cannot say is that Pelosi no more wants Bush to succeed in Iraq than bin Laden does. Whether it realizes this or not, the Bush administration is facing a kind of liberal-Islamic alliance: a sympathetic relationship that leading leftists in America have with Islamic radicals around the world.

I’m not suggesting the two groups actually like each other. Actually, they despise each other. Leftists like Pelosi, Barney Frank and Michael Moore despise bin Laden and his fellow radicals because they are religious fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic holy law. That means goodbye to women’s rights and gay rights and, in all candor, goodbye to people like Pelosi, Frank and Moore. By the same token, Islamic radicals like bin Laden detest the American left because, as they see it, the left is the party of atheism, family breakdown and cultural depravity. The left is in the vanguard of imposing secularism, no-fault divorce, gay marriage and libertine social values not only in America but also abroad.

But the man who threatens the Islamic radicals and the American left even more than either group threatens the other is Bush. Leftists don’t like radical Muslims like bin Laden but they absolutely hate Bush. Why? Because from the left’s point of view, bin Laden threatens to impose sharia in Baghdad but Bush threatens to impose sharia in Boston. Bin Laden is the far enemy but Bush is the near enemy.

In the past generation, the left has gone from a party that mainly cares about working people to a party that mainly cares about sex. Labor unions are now a low priority, and abortion and gay rights have become the centerpiece of the left’s social agenda. Bin Laden doesn’t threaten these rights, but Bush does. One more Supreme Court appointment by Bush, and Roe vs. Wade might be jeopardized. The biggest obstacle to gay marriage today is the president and his allies on the religious right.

Consequently the left seems to have developed a devious strategy to share the aims of the enemy abroad in order to defeat the enemy at home. It started in Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Leading leftists like Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Barbara Ehrenreich, Katha Pollit, Jane Fonda, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone and others took out full-page newspaper ads to galvanize public opposition to Bush’s planned invasion of Afghanistan. The left organized more than 100 rallies to stop this action. If the left had been successful, the Taliban would still be in power and the al Qaeda training camps might still be in operation.

The left could not stop Bush in Afghanistan, but it is on the verge of stopping him in Iraq. Now that Iraq has become the central front in the war on terror, the left is working overtime to engineer a Saigon-style evacuation of the American military. The left’s view was passionately stated some time ago by Moore. “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘terrorists’ or the ‘enemy.’ They are the Revolution, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow – and they will win.” It’s pretty obvious whose side Moore and his fellow leftists are on.

Of course as an elected official, Pelosi can’t admit she wants America to lose in Iraq, but what she can do is erect obstacles at every juncture so that it’s impossible for Bush to succeed there. First, try to block the request for more troops. Then, try to block the call for needed additional funds. Then, when the time is right, push to redeploy American troops away from the fighting and to places in the Middle East, where they are powerless to stop the insurgency from toppling the elected Iraqi government.

Who knows what will happen next? It seems likely that Islamic radicals of one sort or another will assume power in Iraq. But an even safer bet, if Pelosi succeeds, is that Bush’s Middle East policy will fall into ruins, he will go down in history as a president as bad as Nixon, and conservative foreign policy will be disgraced for a generation.

Since foreign policy has traditionally been a political strength for the Republicans, what could be better from the left’s point of view than to turn the war on terror into a millstone around the neck of the right? Yes, we may lose Iraq to the Islamic radicals and this would further jeopardize American interests in the Middle East, but all of this would be a price worth paying for inflicting a cataclysmic political defeat on Bush and the right wing. Hillary could walk into the Oval Office in '08.

Bin Laden, it seems, is ready to do his part to work with the American left. Some may think him reluctant to cooperate with “infidels,” but we know from al Qaeda’s collaboration with Baathist insurgents in Iraq that bin Laden is quite willing to ally with one type of infidel in order to expel from the region the greater infidel, America. Bin Laden terms the alliance between Islamic fundamentalists and secular Baathists a “convergence of interests.”

One indication that he seeks a similar alliance with the American left is that bin Laden, who used to attack all Americans as evil, has in recent videotapes dramatically changed his tune. He now openly praises American leftists like Robert Fisk and William Blum and calls for a “truce” in which states that oppose Bush are exempt from future terrorist attacks. What bin Laden seems to be saying to the American left is pretty clear: I and my radical Muslim friends will supply the terror, and you use the casualty lists to demoralize the American people and convince them to get the United States out of Iraq and the Middle East. In this way, bin Laden and his American allies can achieve their shared goal of defeating Bush’s war on terror. Another “convergence of interests.”

So Bush faces two kinds of enemies: the radical Muslims abroad and the Pelosi left at home. The two groups, whose values are sharply opposed and who never speak a word to each other, are nevertheless working in a kind of scissors motion, each prong operating separately, but toward the same end. Bush may discover that his enemy at home is no less dangerous than the enemy abroad. The war on terror might be lost not on the streets of Baghdad but in the corridors of Congress.

Dinesh D’Souza is the author of “The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11,” just published by Doubleday. He is the Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f … NKH9T1.DTL

This article appeared on page E - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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