D’Souza on Radical Islam vs. the Radical Left
How sad. Dinesh D’Souza has been making the point that traditional Moslems and American conservatives are natural allies, which is quite true, and almost obvious. He of course is careful to distinguish traditional Moslems from the Bin-Laden style radicals, who represent traditional Islam about as well as Trotsky represents traditional liberalism. But now I read this by D’Souza:
At one point Berkowitz accuses me of holding that “the cultural left presents a threat to America as grave as that posed by radical Islam.” What? The Left is as dangerous to America as al Qaeda, the radical mullahs in Iran, the jihadist insurgents in Iraq, and the worldwide network of radical Islam? Nowhere do I say this, and I challenge Berkowitz to substantiate his allegation.
Doesn’t D’Souza realize that the cultural Left is a far graver threat than radical Islam? Let us put aside the question of whether the culture Left will kill as many people in the future as it has in the past (remember Communism?). Suppose it will kill zero, and al Qaeda will kill 100,000 people. America minus 100,000 people is America almost entirely intact, indeed, perhaps even invigorated. World War III, with its much greater toll, did not come close to destroying America. But the aim of the Left is to eliminate most of what we think of as America. They repudiate the Founding Fathers as scientifically ingnorant, sexist, theocratic, racist, homophobic, and artistically backward. They dream of an entirely different world, one in which Christianity is drained of content, in which people are not allowed to say what they think about morality, science, or privileged minorities, in which what we eat and the things we buy are chosen by the government, not by ourselves, in which our earnings are taken by the Left and spent for us by them, not ourselves. Is this a real danger? Look at what’s happened already. And compare that with the petty successes of al Qaeda.