America - Dinesh D\'souza America\'s

¶ … America - Dinesh D'Souza

America's enemies, according to D'Souza, include the Taliban, radical Islamic terrorists - who are also "deeply religious Muslims" (p. 7) - led by Osama bin Laden. Why do they hate us? D'Souza writes that for one thing, Muslims see that Israel receives many of their weapons and other war materials from the U.S. For another, bin Laden rages against U.S. sanctions against Iraq (note: the book was published in 2002, prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq) and also the fact that the U.S. "piously invokes principles of...human rights while supporting undemocratic regimes..." (p. 18). The "poverty and degradation of the Islamic world" is blamed on the Western world, specifically "American oppression." The West, D'Souza writes (p. 19) is based on "principles that are radically different from those of traditional societies" - subversive too - and if U.S. principles are "admitted" into other societies, it will "displace cherished values" and produce a society "unrecognizable from the one it destroyed."

Is D'Souza right? When he says Islamic thinkers may be partly correct (that American capitalism is "a form of idolatry"; high rates of divorce, pornography, abortion, racism and other moral flaws indicate huge problems) he is on the right track. But hen he says the Islamic critique stands out as "refreshing clarity" he is way out in left field. The only thing really clear about Islamic fundamentalism is that they are willing to be suicide bombers in order to kill Americans.

QUESTION #2: The case that D'Souza puts forward in chapter two is bizarre in places. Like on page 46, saying the reason that Western civilization "became dominant" over the last 500 or so years is because the West is "evil" - and specifically because it beat up everybody else with "ethnocentrism, colonialism, imperialism, and racism." It's the "oppression theory," D'Souza claims that helped those nations who were colonized by the West, and he makes sense when he points out that while British colonialism was bad for his grandfather in India, it was good for him. The British brought English language traditions to India, and that helped him; the West brought technology to India, and that is good, too. And the British built roads, railway systems, docks, irrigation, and more, and here in the U.S., "Jesse Jackson is vastly better off because his ancestors were enslaved than he would have been if that had never happened." Why? Jackson and "others like him" (that sounds like of racist or at least condescending) would be living in Somalia or Ethiopia or Nigeria. Pretty strange idea, but he is right by saying colonialism brought "millions of nonwhite people into the orbit of Western freedom."