Armavirumque, Mar 12, 2007 01:49 PM

Dinesh D’Souza responds

by James Panero

All this week, over at National Review online, Dinesh D’Souza will be posting a multi-part response to his conservative critics. Today he writes:

I expected, in this book, to stir the angry passions of the Left.... Much stranger have been the petulant, even belligerent, attacks from the Right. Some conservatives, like George Gilder and David Klinghoffer, have praised The Enemy at Home. Others, like Mona Charen, Rod Dreher, and Stanley Kurtz, have respectfully disagreed with it while also praising aspects of it. But several conservative reviewers and pundits, including Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Scott Johnson, Robert Spencer, and Peter Berkowitz, have harshly attacked the book and launched the most extravagant accusations against me. I am especially struck by their wild charges of ignorance and superficiality in my analysis. Having grown up in a country, India, that has 200 million Muslims — nearly as many as in the entire Middle East — and having studied the leading thinkers of radical Islam (Sayyid Qutb, Ayatollah Khomeini, Maulana Mawdudi, Ali Shariati, and so on), I have more than a passing familiarity with Islam and its practitioners — a lot more than they do, in fact. What I say may be flawed or wrongheaded, and I am happy to learn from my mistakes, but why the savagery of the attacks? What heresy have I committed that the angry men of the Right have drawn their daggers against me?

Read part one of D’Souza’s rebuttal here. More to come later this week. On Friday, D’Souza’s critics--including Victor Davis Hanson, Scott Johnson, and Roger Kimball--will respond.

In the meantime, D’Souza can now add Daniel Pipes to his list of conservative critics.

And what do the people say? Last time we checked, the comments on D’Souza’s original AOL blog post about Johnson’s article--in which D’Souza claimed that "I thought the New Criterion went out of business years ago"--were running 9 to 1 in favor of Johnson. A quick look now has the tally at about 20 to 1. And some of the responses aren’t pretty. Could it be that Dinesh’s blog is only read by "petulant, even belligerent... angry men of the Right" --like this one?

Mr. D’Souza purports to have a "real knowledge of the Muslim world." I wonder how he managed that. As a woman who once belonged to a traditional Islamic society, I know that traditional muslim women (and they are even now the majority among all muslim women), are not in the habit of spending time alone with unrelated men, freely expressing their opinions about matters of importance to their community. Is Mr. D’Souza saying he "knows" these communities although direct contact and first-hand knowledge with something like half of it’s memebers would surely have been denied to him? Or is he implying that the opinions of secluded muslim women should really not be allowed to get in the way of his extolling the virtues of patriarchy?

Or how about this one (our personal favorite)?

How can you claim to be a ’culture warrior,’ let alone a leader in that long running debate, and not be familiar with the New Criterion?

Kinda seems like claiming to be a soldier but not being familiar with those little metal things called "bullets."

Remind me: Who was it again that, in his initial response to a sensible, three-thousand word feature article on his book, attacked the publication the article appeared in and denounced its author as a "Midwesterner" and a "small minded nativis[t]" who hasn’t "traveled far from home"? Oh, that’s right. It was Dinesh.

When it comes to "petulant, even belligerent... angry men of the Right," Dinesh D’Souza is in a league of his own.