Nonsense On Stilts Afflicts the Right As Well

VDH agrees with me on Dinesh D'Souza's latest:

After 9/11, many leftists cited American faults that supposedly accounted for Osama bin Laden's savage attack.

The late Susan Sontag, for example, justified the terrorists' suicide bombing: "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?"

But there were also those on the right who argued that the jihadists' furor was payback for our own sins.

Rev. Jerry Falwell pronounced that America the godless had gotten what it deserved: "Pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle . . . I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"

Now there is another angle to the "blame America" game, this time from the secular right. In his book "The Enemy at Home," Dinesh D'Souza, of the Hoover Institution (where I work as well), charges that our decadent culture turns off traditional Muslims — otherwise the potential allies of American conservatives — and often renders them sympathetic to jihadist rhetoric.

He then goes further, arguing that the cultural permissiveness and obscenity of our leftists indirectly created a bin Laden. Now in a de facto alliance with the terrorists, the left, according to D'Souza, plots an end to traditional America.

D'Souza's solution is for conservatives here to embrace conservative Muslims, in a shared struggle against both the American left that misrepresented us and the jihadists who now misrepresent them.

But D'Souza's strained effort to fault millions of Americans for 9/11 proves no more convincing than was Susan Sontag's or Jerry Falwell's.

Where the good professor and I do part company is whether leftists want America to lose the War on Terror. I believe they do, as they believe a) we deserve to be attacked by terrorists for our many sins and b) our losing the Vietnam War is considered to be the great victory of the American Left. Professor Hanson believes they don't, as an Al Qaeda victory would end freedom here. I don't think the Left gives a fig about freedom and hasn't since becoming enamored of the notion of the Communist police state early last century.

But we both agree that it was murdering Muslim madmen, not lefty moonbats, who caused the horror of 9/11.