From Thomas Paine’s Corner
By Ivan Eland

Dinesh D’Souza, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has raised a ruckus in his new book The Enemy at Home. In the book, he contends that the 9/11 attackers were motivated by neither U.S. foreign policy abroad nor by a hatred of U.S. freedom, as President Bush has repeatedly argued. Instead, D’Souza declares that Osama bin Laden hates the liberal U.S. culture that promotes contraception, abortion, and homosexuality. In a recent op-ed piece in the Washington Post defending the book, D’Souza says that he doesn’t hate America. No, he just hates liberal America and is reprehensibly trying to use the horrible 9/11 attacks to score points against the Democrats of the left.

D’Souza is not the first person to try to turn the 9/11 attacks to his advantage. President Bush disingenuously tied them to Saddam Hussein and invaded Iraq. In fact, D’Souza is not even the first person on the right to try to pin the blame for 9/11 on the left. Jerry Falwell blamed gays, pagans, and the ACLU for the attacks. Although D’Souza seems horrified to have been compared with Falwell, they both end up at the same place. Falwell argued that God was punishing the United States for the activities of these liberal groups, and D’Souza argues that bin Laden has been enraged by American liberal groups’ overseas distribution of contraceptives and lobbying of non-Western countries to liberalize laws against homosexuality and abortion. Although Falwell’s explanation is religious and D’Souza’s is more secular, they both blame the left. Because D’Souza is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, however, he claims that he is not an unqualified right-wing hack.

But D’Souza’s qualifications for commenting on the causes of 9/11 are suspect. D’Souza’s biography on the Hoover Institution’s website indicates no scholarship expertise in fundamentalist Islam. In fact, D’Souza’s biography indicates no expertise on terrorism, foreign affairs, or national security policy. His Hoover Institution biography lists his expertise as follows: Social and individual responsibility, civil rights and affirmative action, economics and society, higher education. All previous books he has authored are on domestic subjects, and he was a senior domestic policy analyst at the White House during the Reagan administration. Academically, he earned a B.A. in English. After 9/11, everyone wants to be a foreign policy expert.

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