That third-rate right-wing wanker, Dinesh D’Souza, had a article in the Washington Post, in which he attempted to defend himself from accusations of appalling stupidity in trying to blame radical Muslim attacks on the US on liberal culture. Of course, he failed. Instead, he just repeated his crazy claim that it’s all godless Hollywood’s fault.
The thrust of the radical Muslim critique of America is that Islam is under attack from the global forces of atheism and immorality — and that the United States is leading that attack.
David Neiwert ably rips that apart on matters of fact—it’s simply absurd that anyone would associate the chosen targets as symbols of atheism and immorality.
Funny that D’Souza would assume that the “pagan depravity” that angers Muslims and radicalizes them has something to do with hip-hop music and the Oscars, when the only real “pagan depravity” that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon represents is the willingness of entrenched American powers to readily oppress and blithely murder thousands of Arabs in the sake of a nonexistent threat from “weapons of mass destruction.”
I was thinking, though, that D’Souza is also wrong in principle. If extremists and jihadists despise our culture and are using violence and threats to try and compel us to change, isn’t it the grossest kind of cowardice to throw up our hands and say “they’re right, we need to align our culture with that of our enemies”? That’s basically what D’Souza is suggesting—not a military retreat, but instead the abject, unresisting abandonment of portions of Western culture, simply because terrorists demand it.
It seems to me that instead of surrendering, we ought to be celebrating those aspects of our culture that they find most objectionable: things like diversity, secularism, atheism, sex, independent women, and irreverence. And I thought of someone representative of those ideals, who’d also piss off the right wing as much as she would the Muslim freaks.
