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Banned
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How Did This Guy Get a Pass From the Liberal Media,The Hudson Inst. & Reagan's Admin?
I cannot envision the Washington Times, IBD, or the National Review publishing anything as unflattering to conservatives or as skewed or polarizing as these two pieces seem intended to be towards liberals, IMO.
This writer's website bio describes him this way:
Quote:
D’Souza is the Robert and Karen Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
D'Souza has been called one of the "top young public-policy makers in the country" by Investor’s Business Daily. The New York Times Magazine named him one of America's most influential conservative thinkers. The World Affairs Council lists him as one of the nation's 500 leading authorities on international issues. Newsweek cited him as one of the country's most prominent Asian Americans.
Before joining the Hoover Institution, Mr. D'Souza was the John M. Olin Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In 1987-88 he served as senior policy analyst at the Reagan White House. From 1985 to 1987 he was managing editor of Policy Review. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1983....
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Is his thinking typical at conservative think tanks or in conservative political circles? If it is, I think he thinks that the US is in for a long, long war, against the islamic fascist butcher killers, and against their perceived enablers, here in the paterland.
I think that he got onto the Op Ed pages in Philly and LA because of his resume and because he is shilling his new book, but what does how does his thinking reflect on the judgment at Dartmouth, then the Reagan white house and then at AEI and at Hoover.
A final reaction is to wonder, out loud....if the reasoning abilities of all sides of the political and ideological spectrum......of the ivy leaguers....the "cream of the crop", are evenly matched?
I think that this was extreme, but that it was meant to rally an "in person" partisan political audience and it was delivered by the president's obsessively parisan, chief political strategist:
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062400097.html
Remarks of Karl Rove at the New York Conservative Party
White House
Wednesday, June, 22, 2006
....... But perhaps the most important difference between conservatives and liberals can be found in the area of national security. Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11, liberals believed it was time to� submit a petition. I am not joking. Submitting a petition is precisely what Moveon.org did. It was a petition imploring the powers that be" to "use moderation and restraint in responding to the� terrorist attacks against the United States."
I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt as I watched the Twin Towers crumble to the earth; a side of the Pentagon destroyed; and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble.
Moderation and restraint is not what I felt - and moderation and restraint is not what was called for. It was a moment to summon our national will - and to brandish steel.
MoveOn.Org, Michael Moore and Howard Dean may not have agreed with this, but the American people did. Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said: we will defeat our enemies. Liberals saw what happened to us and said: we must understand our enemies. Conservatives see the United States as a great nation engaged in a noble cause; liberals see the United States and they see � Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia.
Has there been a more revealing moment this year than when Democratic Senator Richard Durbin, speaking on the Senate floor, compared what Americans had done to prisoners in our control at Guantanamo Bay with what was done by Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot - three of the most brutal and malevolent figures in the 20th century?
Let me put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts to the region the words of Senator Durbin, certainly putting America's men and women in uniform in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.........
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...but Mr. D’Souza is neither of these things, and so I wonder what could be motivating him, and who does he expect that his audience is?
Quote:
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/n...l/16507550.htm
Posted on Sun, Jan. 21, 2007
Not a clash of religions
For many Western liberals - and even some conservatives - the war on terror is a clash of opposed fundamentalisms: Christian fundamentalism vs. Islamic fundamentalism. And the solution? Promote secularism both here in America and throughout the Muslim world. This means urging our Muslim allies in Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt and elsewhere to get rid of Muslim laws and have secular laws. It means closing down the Muslim schools and replacing them with secular schools. It means encouraging secular programs on radio and TV.
Not only is this diagnosis of the problem wrong, but the solutions proposed are actually fueling Muslim rage and making future terrorist attacks against us more likely. The reason is that, from the point of view of Islamic radicals, America is not hated because it is Christian. Rather, America is hated because it is secular, what Osama bin Laden has called "the leading power of the unbelievers." So by promoting secularism, we are corroborating the charge of radical Muslims that we are the enemies of their religion, and this also alienates traditional Muslims and pushes them into the radical camp.
It is time to revisit some common assumptions. Many Americans consider Islamic fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalists as essentially equivalent, "kindred spirits," in the words of the late novelist William Styron. Al Gore finds in President Bush "the American version of the same fundamentalist impulse that we see in Saudi Arabia." In her book The Mighty and the Almighty, Madeleine Albright frets that "hard-liners can find in the Koran and the Bible justifications for endless conflict."
In this view, Christian and Muslim religious fanatics are once again fighting each other, as they have done in the past. As Jim Wallis puts it in his book God's Politics, there is a close parallel between Islam's holy war against the West and George Bush's holy war against Islamic terrorism. From this perspective, the best solution is for America to stand up for the principles of secularism and oppose both Muslim fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism.
This view of the war is founded, however, on a superficial understanding of bin Laden's rhetoric declaring a religious war of civilizations. Bin Laden does speak of the world as being divided into a "region of faith" and a "region of infidelity." And at times he defines the clash as one between Muslims and the "crusaders."
But the context of bin Laden's arguments clearly shows that he is not speaking of a religious war between Islam and Christianity. In the same videotaped remarks in which he posits these conflicts, he praises Christianity. In one statement, he observes that Islam respects the prophets of Judaism, Christianity and Islam "without distinguishing among them."
In the classical Muslim understanding, there is a fundamental distinction between Jews and Christians, on the one hand, and polytheists and atheists on the other. According to Islam, Judaism and Christianity are incomplete but genuine revelations. As monotheists, Jews and Christians have historically been entitled to Muslim respect and even protection. In every Islamic empire, from the Umayyad to the Abbasid to the Ottoman, Jews and Christians were permitted to practice their religion, and in no Muslim regime has it ever been considered legitimate to systematically kill them.
By contrast, polytheists and atheists have always been anathema to Islam. The Koran says, "Fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "Slay the idolaters wherever you find them." These passages, which bin Laden frequently quotes, do not refer to Christians, because Christians are not considered pagans or idolaters. Rather, they refer to those, like the Bedouins of ancient Arabia, who worship many gods or no god. Muslims are commanded to fight these unbelievers, especially when they threaten the House of Islam.
Muslim radicals could repudiate the entire Islamic tradition and argue that Christians and Jews are no different from atheists and deserve the same treatment. But this claim would undoubtedly alienate traditional Muslims. Sheikh Sayyed Muhammad Tantawi, head of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, recently argued the traditional view that "Islam has never been and will never be at war with Christianity."
For bin Laden to declare war against Christianity would divide even the radical Muslim camp. The influential radical Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi has said that Muslims "believe in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Our Islamic faith is not complete without them."
Islamic radicals such as bin Laden make their case against America and the West not on the grounds that these cultures are Christian, but on the grounds that they have abandoned Christianity. In his May 2006 letter to President Bush, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad faulted America not for being Christian, but for not being Christian enough. Many years earlier, the radical theoretician Sayyid Qutb made the same point: The main reason for the West's moral decay is that in the modern era, "religious convictions are no more than a matter of antiquarian interest."
Other Muslim radicals today echo these arguments. The influential Pakistani scholar Khurshid Ahmad, leader of the Islamic Assembly of Students, or Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba, argues: "Had Western culture been based on Christianity, on morality, on faith, the language and modus operandi of the contact and conflict would have been different. But that is not the case. The choice is between the divine principle and a secular materialistic culture."
Even though Christianity has eroded, Muslim radicals contend that the ancient crusading spirit now infuses the pagan culture of the West. When bin Laden calls America a crusader state, he means that America is on a vicious international campaign to impose its atheist system of government and its pagan values on Muslims. How? By supporting secular dictators in Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. And by exporting a secular culture that undermines the traditional values of Islam.
In this way, bin Laden argues that America is hell-bent on destroying the Muslim religion. The rallying cry of Islamic radicalism is that "Islam is under attack." In a 1998 declaration, bin Laden called on Muslims to "launch attacks against the armies of the American devils" and to kill Americans, whom he identified as the "helpers of Satan." In a 2003 sermon, he praised the Sept. 11 hijackers and compared the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to the idols in the Kaaba that the Prophet Muhammad destroyed in the year 630 upon his victorious return to Mecca.
Thus, the liberal doctrine that the war against terrorism is a battle of two opposed forms of religious fundamentalism is false. This is not why the Islamic radicals are fighting against America. From the perspective of bin Laden and his allies, the war is between the Muslim-led forces of monotheism and morality against the America-led forces of atheism and immorality. Secularism, not Christian fundamentalism, is responsible for producing a blowback of Muslim rage.
Dinesh D'Souza (dineshjdsouza@aol.com) will discuss his new book, "The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11,".....
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Quote:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...mment-opinions
<b>How the left led us into 9/11
The Clinton and Carter administrations made the U.S. look like a weak, attractive target for terrorists.</b>
By Dinesh D'Souza, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is the author, most recently, of "The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11."
January 18, 2007
IN CONSIDERING a funding cutoff for U.S. troops in Iraq, the liberal leadership in Congress runs the risk of making the United States more vulnerable to future attacks, not just in the Middle East but here at home. To understand this, it's not enough to revisit the factors that led to the Iraq invasion. We must consider the roots of 9/11 itself. Only by understanding the policies that sowed the seeds of 9/11 can we intelligently decide how best to proceed in fighting the war on terror.
Pundits on the left say that 9/11 was the result of a "blowback" of resistance from the Islamic world against U.S. foreign policy. At first glance, this seems to make no sense. American colonialism in the Middle East? The U.S. has no history of colonialism there. Washington's support for unelected dictatorial regimes in the region? The Muslims can't be outraged about this, because there are no other kinds of regimes in the region. U.S. support for Israel and wars against the Muslims? Yes, but the U.S. has frequently fought on the side of the Muslims, as in Afghanistan in the 1980s or in the Persian Gulf War.
But in a sense the liberal pundits are right. The U.S. made two gigantic foreign policy blunders in recent decades that did sow the seeds of 9/11. What the liberals haven't recognized is that these blunders were the direct result of their policies and actions, and were carried out by Democratic presidents -- Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
To understand this, we need a little perspective. Radical Islam became a global force in 1979, when it captured its first major state, Iran. Before that, radical organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood were fighting losing battles to overthrow their local governments. This changed with the success of the Khomeini regime in Iran. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was the first Muslim leader to describe the U.S. as the "Great Satan" and to counsel martyrdom and jihad against it. Iran continues to be a model for radical Muslims.
Khomeini's ascent to power was aided by Carter's policies. Carter came into office stressing his support for human rights. His advisors told him that he could not consistently support the shah of Iran, who had secret police and was widely accused of violating human rights. The administration began to withdraw its support and finally pulled the rug out from under the shah, forcing him to step down.
The result was Khomeini, whose regime was vastly more tyrannical than the shah's. The Khomeini revolution provided state sponsorship for Islamic radicalism and terrorism and paved the way for Osama bin Laden and 9/11.
Clinton's policies also helped to provoke 9/11. After the Cold War, leading Islamic radicals returned to their home countries. Bin Laden left Afghanistan and went back to Saudi Arabia; Ayman Zawahiri returned to Egypt. They focused on fighting their own rulers -- what they termed the "near enemy" -- in order to establish states under Islamic law. But in the mid- to late 1990s, these radicals shifted strategy. They decided to stop fighting the near enemy and to attack the "far enemy," the U.S.
The world's sole superpower would seem to be much more formidable than local Muslim rulers such as Hosni Mubarak in Egypt or the Saudi royal family. Bin Laden argued, however, that the far enemy was actually weaker and more vulnerable. He was confident that when kicked in their vital organs, Americans would pack up and run. Just like in Vietnam. Just like in Mogadishu.
Bin Laden saw his theory of American weakness vindicated during the Clinton era. In 1993, Islamic radicals bombed the World Trade Center. The Clinton administration did little. In 1996, Muslim terrorists attacked the Khobar Towers facility on a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia. No response. In 1998, Al Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa. Clinton responded with a few perfunctory strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan. These did no real harm to Al Qaeda and only strengthened the perception of American ineptitude. In 2000, Islamic radicals bombed the U.S. destroyer Cole. Again, the Clinton team failed to act. By his own admission, Bin Laden concluded that his suspicion of American pusillanimity and weakness was correct. He became emboldened to plot the 9/11 attacks.
Still, the 2001 attacks might have been averted had the Clinton administration launched an effective strike against Bin Laden in the years leading up to them. Clinton has said he made every effort to get Bin Laden during his second term. Yet former CIA agent Michael Scheuer estimates that there were about 10 chances to capture or kill Bin Laden during this period and that the Clinton people failed to capitalize on any of them.
Between 1996 and mid-2000, Bin Laden was not in deep hiding. He gave sermons in Kandahar's largest mosque. He talked openly on his satellite phone. He also granted a number of media interviews: in 1996, with author Robert Fisk; in 1997, with Peter Arnett of CNN; in 1998, with John Miller of ABC News; in 1999, with a journalist affiliated with Time magazine. Isn't it strange that all these people could find Bin Laden but the Clinton administration couldn't?
Two lessons can be drawn from these sorry episodes. The first one, derived from Carter's actions, is: In getting rid of the bad regime, make sure that you don't get a worse one. This happened in Iran and could happen again, in Iraq, if leading Democrats in Congress have their way. The second lesson, derived from Clinton's inaction, is that the perception of weakness emboldens our enemies. If the Muslim insurgents and terrorists believe that the U.S. is divided and squeamish about winning the war on terror, they are likely to escalate their attacks on Americans abroad and at home. In that case, 9/11 will be only the beginning.
Credit: DINESH D'SOUZA, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is the author, most recently, of "The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.
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Quote:
http://www.dineshdsouza.com/books/enemy-intro.html
THE ENEMY AT HOME:
THE CULTURAL LEFT AND ITS RESPONSIBILITY FOR 9/11
by Dinesh D'Souza
In this book I make a claim that will seem startling at the outset. The cultural left in this country (such people as Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, George Soros, Michael Moore, Bill Moyers, and Noam Chomsky) is responsible for causing 9/11. The term “cultural left” does not refer to the Democratic Party. Nor does it refer to all liberals. It refers to the left wing of the Democratic Party—admittedly the most energetic group among Democrats, and the main source of the party’s ideas. The cultural left also includes a few Republicans, notably those who adopt a left-wing stance on foreign policy and social issues. Moreover, the cultural left includes organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Watch, and moveon.org.
In faulting the cultural left, I am not making the absurd accusation that this group blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world. The Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks were the product of this visceral rage—some of it based on legitimate concerns, some of it based on wrongful prejudice—but all of it fueled and encouraged by the cultural left. Thus without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.
I realize that this is a strong charge, one that no one has made before. But it is a completely neglected aspect of the 9/11 debate, and it is critical to understanding the current debate over the war against terrorism. Here in America, the political right routinely accuses the left of being weak in its response to Islamic terrorism. For example, conservatives often allege that the left’s desire to “understand” the roots of Islamic discontent dilutes American resolve in fighting the enemy. If this is true, then fortifying the left’s resolve becomes the obvious solution. My argument is quite different. It is that the left is the primary reason for Islamic anti-Americanism as well as the anti-Americanism of other traditional cultures around the world. I intend to show that the left has actively fostered the intense hatred of America that has led to murderous attacks such as 9/11. If I am right, then no war against terrorism can be effectively fought using the left-wing premises that are now accepted doctrine among mainstream liberals and Democrats.
The left is responsible for 9/11 in the following ways. First, the cultural left has fostered a decadent American culture that angers and repulses traditional societies, especially those in the Islamic world, that are being overwhelmed with this culture. In addition, the left is waging an aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family and to promote secular values in non-Western cultures.......
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01-22-2007, 11:47 PM
