Letters to the Editor
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How revealing...
What an interesting interview. My attention to D'Souza had been picqued by the earlier Slate article, but my understanding of where D'Souza is coming from was greatly enhanced by this interview.
It's particularly interesting that he chooses to start with the subject of Iran. I wonder, is he taking cues from Bush & company, or are the cues coming from a third party? And while we're on the subject, blaming Carter for Iran's current situation is facile at best. The Shah of Iran was in power in 1979 because the elected Prime Minister was ousted in 1953 by a CIA engineered coup, which had the approval of Eisenhower. By 1979, the Shah was ill, and had built up resentment among many groups, from communist sympathizers to the Islamic fundamentalists led by Ayatollah Khomeni. Carter simply chose not to support a crumbling regime, despite promises of support made by his national security advisor.
One could argue that rather than succumbing to the pressure of a monolithic "left," Carter decided that overt American intervention in an unstable state bordering both the USSR and Afghanistan, where a bloody war was being fought between Islamic mujahideen and the Soviets, would be dangerously provocative.
Blaming Carter for any real or perceived conflict with Iran is most likely just an example of capitalizing on Carter's recent notoriety in order to boost book sales.
It's clear that the same partisan lens through which D'Souza views this particular issue colors the rest of his thinking as well. While his contention that American culture rather than American actions and policies influence Muslim views has some merit, he ignores the possibility that from the outside, American decadence and American conservatism are both threats to Muslim culture, and American actions, such as support for Israel and the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan support the thesis that America is out to destroy the Islamic world.
No one in America, whether "liberal," "conservative," corporate, or political, is going to get a pass from the Islamic point of view. Attempting to place the blame on a specific group of Americans simply undermines any chance to bring Western and Islamic cultures to a workable co-existence. If our conflict with the Islamic world, as represented by the September 11 attacks, is so very important, then D'Souza's attempt to lay the blame at the feet of a political ideology is unpatriotic in the divisive way that Ben Franklin counseled against: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
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Nice job
Alex Koppelman has done a very fine job of dissecting D'Souza's analysis of the roots of al-Qaida's attack on the U.S. The interview is informative, both in focusing on what D'Souza claims in his book and in how D'Souza is forced to backpedal on several of his broad claims. Great work!
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This guy
I was not familiar with this guy, although I was aware of what the Hoover Institute is. To me, he doesn't seem significantly different from Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, and the rest of the right wing cheerleaders. His argument, like theirs, is 25 percent lies, 25 percent distortion, and 50 percent bullshit.
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The 9/11 attack was an inside job. There is no al-Qaida
Sounds like Dineesh doesn't have internet access. That's where the information is these days. The mainstream media has virtually been absorbed by the government.
9/11 was contrived, and is being covered up by the people in power - with press compliance. This information of a false flag attack is easy to examine. It simply must be answered by any serious investigator.
Furthermore, Al-Qaida is an invention of the CIA, and does not exist as a worldwide terrorist organization. They are essentially cave men w/ cell phones. This information is also well documented.
Dineesh wrote a book that should be dismissed without further comment. He's obviously incompetent on the subject of the 9/11 false-flag attack.
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"conservative intelligentsia?"
"For almost 20 years, Dinesh D'Souza has been a prominent force in the conservative intelligentsia..."
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha...
Well, most everything that could be said about this helium-huffing, chirpy voiced spin merchant has already been covered by Salon letter writers, particularly the "Editor's choice" selections. But here's a bit more...
If this is the best face of "affirmative action" that conservatives can muster (the same nitwits who gave us Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court), there's not much to fear.
Blaming Carter for "losing" Iran is the height of idiocy. Iran was never "ours" save for those periods of corporate and imperialist domination attained with the help of U.S. and British-imposed stooges.
When the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown by the CIA in 1953, and replaced by the Shah, it set the stage for the eventual ascendancy of theocrats. Carter didn't arrive until the last act of a script that had been written decades earlier.
When the First Nitwit declared Iran to be of the "Axis of Evil," I winced as he stumbled through his teleprompted nonsense. Iranian moderates, who had slowly been returning some sense of rationality to their country were instantly doomed, and were in fact disempowered within weeks. It was just as inconcievable as when some bozo had Dumbya proclaim the forthcoming Near Eastern slaughter a "crusade," as if every Muslim had forgotten that their progenitors' blood had run deep in the streets of Jerusalem (along with the blood of Jews, who had been getting along quite well there).
If d'Souza managed to get through an entire book without mentioning the role that Abrams, Wolfowitz, Perle, etc., played in these fiascoes, he should never be allowed to destroy trees again for the purpose of disseminating his hogwash.
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The Only Mystery
This guy has written a book that sounds like (I won't waste my time actually reading it) it was written by the same kind as those who say that their minds are being controlled by Martians via a radio receiver they planted in his teeth.
The mystery to me is how does someone like this get his or her stuff into print. I checked and his book is published by Doubleday -- not exactly a fringe publisher. Yeah, I suppose they want to sell books but do they really expect that a book that's so obviously a product of an addled mind is really going to sell that many?