but it is liberals who get accused of "hating America". An open discussion of these matters is long overdue, but I hope DS isn't expecting gratitude from the right wing for helping to provoke it.

... he's arguing that the terrorists hate our freedom, and thus, those of us who are most free from the archaic, medieval norms embodied by fundamentalists are to blame for provoking their attacks? So the means by which we can best deter terrorists is to... appease them by ceasing to act in a manner befitting a free society? OK, I think neocon rhetoric has finally eaten itself. Fine work, D'Souza.

Actually what they hate us for is our imperialistic attitude that what's good for America -- and American business -- is good for the world. Tied to that is the arrogance of the American Christianist missionaries who believe that the only True religion is that of Virgil Goode and Pat Robertson, who's been known to combine both business and the pulpit in some shady dealings with shady dictators. Neither of these attitudes could remotely be called "liberal."

If we've been imposing secular American values on the Islamic world, it's been at the behest of corporate America. The two best-known logos in the world are Coca-Cola and Mickey Mouse, and the last time I checked, neither of those are hotbeds of liberal thought. Hollywood may make the movies, but it's the corporations that produce the films that distribute them overseas, not the actors or directors who might occasionally send a check to the ACLU. The people that run these corporations are looking for ways to make a huge profit, and that's not something liberals are known for.

As far as religion is concerned, it's the muscular evangelical church that has to answer for several centuries of attempts to undermine the Muslim faith, not the secular humanists. As far as I know, there hasn't been a wave of left-wing university professors going over to Africa to read aloud from Walt Whitman and Susan Sontag in an effort to convert entire villages to the Harvard Faculty Club.

If anything, the so-called "volcano of anger" toward America since before and after September 11 has been directed not at the freedoms we have or our democractic form of government, or Paris Hilton, for that matter (although they might have a case on the last one), but at our arrogance in presenting ourselves as the Greatest Country in the History of the World. For the most part, many countries aspire to those freedoms but on their own terms, not some boilerplate imposed on them by the home office, the mother church, or the 82nd Airborne. The idea that our Western materialism, capitalism, and evangelism is somehow the fault of the liberals is laughable. If anything, liberals, whether they're in Hollywood, the media, Congress, the non-profit sector, or the universities are the ones who have been preaching tolerance, diversity, and respect for other religions and cultures and cringe at the idea of America being presented to the rest of the world from the business end of a satellite dish or a McDonald's drive-through. It's the conservatives with their smug arrogance about their "traditional family values" that include Wal-Mart and the Baby Jesus that run a greater risk of angering and repulsing other societies.

he is ann coulter's doppelgänger.

i think he's sussed out that she's making a lot of money from the brow ridged crowd and he's getting his slice of the knuckledragger's pie

He talks about how terrible it is that we condemn Bush more than we condemn Saddam or Bin Laden. I agree that this is happening, but I don't see it as terrible. In fact, it's a very reasonable response.

Bush has far more power to inflict far more damage (and has done so) than Saddam or Bin Laden could ever have dreamed of. In this way, Bush is a far more dire threat to the western way of life than a relative handful of pissed off Muslims could ever be.

My thought was "Good riddance." Here was yet another, like David Horowitz, who had decided to switch from left to right because, well, that's where the money may be found. What's awful to contemplate is that D'Souza - a consumate pseudo-intellectual with nary a thought in his head that was not put there by someone even dumber than he is - will be around for years. He will be able to peddle his neo-conservative horseshit for decades.

The sacrifices we must all make to live in a genuinely free country.

Today, the former senior policy analyst for the Reagan administration is the Robert and Karen Rishwain Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank.

Every statement in this article is filled with unsupportable generalizations that are simply false. Bad scholarship, and many ethical lapses. How far has Stanford fallen?

The man is no more than another neocon shill, deserving no more attention than Coulter and O'Reilly. I feel baited, and surely the letters will pour in, and as such things are measured, the story will be a success. But what an odd book to choose to review in this venue? Who's going to rush out to buy it?

although I think he point of view is pretty strange.

How the heck can he seriously say that America is the face of the atheist movement in the world? The U.S. has one of the highest per-capita rates of religious participation in the world -- between 91% and 97%:

http://www.pitzer.edu/academics/faculty/zuckerman/atheism.html

Muslims have long been distrustful of the Western world and its culture, but I doubt the "liberal" culture is what keeps them up at night. When President Bush said "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile", it didn't trigger a negative reaction in Muslims because it accidentally referenced an athesitic attack on their values; it referenced a Christian attack on Muslim values (and their countries).

It seems that D'Souza thinks that everything would be hunky-dory on the "Muslim street" if conservative America could wink and nod at conservative Muslims and say "Yeah, we hate those liberals, too." He sees it as traditional values versus progressive values, when in fact the real conflict is radical Islam versus everyone else. They don't want to spread A fundamental religion as state law, they want to spread THEIR fundamental religion as state law. And no amount of "we hate abortion and gays, too" is going to pacify them.