The New Criterion

But what was the real highlight of the CPAC conference? It was our own Ellie Thermansen handing out 75 photocopies of Scott Johnson’s article on "D’Souza Goes Native" to conventioneers--waiting in line to meet D’Souza himself at his book signing. Click here for more pictures.

For Roger Kimball’s own take on D’Souza, be sure to check out Roger’s letter to Scott Johnson posted over at Powerline (and Scott’s response).

Dear Scott,

You ask if I have read Dinesh’s response to your article in The New Criterion: yes. I thought it a sad and preposterous piece of work--not unlike the book, alas. It also illustrates the often overlooked fact that the preposterous and the malevolent are not mutually exclusive: they can, and often do, cohabit quite comfortably. Many conservatives have criticized The Enemy at Home; Dinesh promises to "expose their errors of fact and logic, and their massive ignorance of Islam." I await the corrections. But it is worth noting that the subject at hand--who is responsible for the terrorist attacks of 9/11--doesn’t require much knowledge of Islam. What it requires is an understanding of the sort of homicidal mania that inspires Islamic radicals. To pretend otherwise is (as Bishop Berekley said in another context) to stir up a cloud of dust and then complain that you cannot see. I might also point out that "Islamophobia" is a misnomer. A phobia is an irrational or groundless fear. Nothing could be more rational or well grounded than a fear of radical Islam.

Dinesh has done some good work in the past--indeed, I have praised him in the pages of that magazine he no longer reads--but this book is more than a disappointment, more than a shoddy piece of work: it is a disgrace. And it is not just an intellectual and (ultimately) a moral disgrace, it is a politically dangerous disgrace: first, because it illegitimately reinforces certain leftish stereotypes about conservatives and, second, because it systematically ignores or misrepresents the nature of the Islamic threat to Western civilization. Dinesh has always courted cheap controversy for the sake of selling himself--it was one of the least attractive aspects of his road show with Stanley Fish following the publication of Illiberal Education--but his calculation that notoriety leads to sales which lead to acclamation and success has foundered on the moral vacuum at the center of this book. He has made himself ridiculous--but it is the ridiculousness not of a buffoon but an agent provocateur (the moral being that buffoons can be dangerous as well as laughable). I am not sure whether it is blindness or active misrepresentation of the truth that is chiefly responsible for The Enemy at Home, but the sad fact is that the book instantiates the charge contained in its title.

Think again.