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 Best-selling author Dinesh D'Souza spoke to a full Cowles Auditorium Sept. 20 about "Christianity, Islam and the War on Terror." Named by the New York Times Magazine one of America's most influential conservative thinkers, D'Souza is the Robert and Karen Rishwain Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and author of numerous books, including, most recently, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (Doubleday, 2007) and What's so Great About Christianity (Regnery, 2007). He spoke at Whitworth as part of the university's Speakers and Artists Series, which seeks to present a broad range of voices, perspectives and ideas that will enrich the intellectual life of the Whitworth campus and the larger community. Later, he agreed to be interviewed for Whitworth Today.
WT: In your Whitworth lecture, you suggested that moderate, mainstream Muslims are forced to choose between the god of the terrorists and the godlessness of Hollywood. How can we present a more accurate picture of America than the one presented by Hollywood and how might that affect the war on terror over the long term?
DD: This is a job for both the U.S. government and U.S. citizens. I'm not calling for censorship or a governmental campaign to block American culture from going abroad. I think our political leaders can do a better job of making the moral case of America and there's nothing wrong with distancing themselves from the excesses of American culture. I think also that U.S. diplomacy can do a better job of showing the rest of the world the "other America." There's a whole side of America – religious America, traditional America – that is invisible to people in other cultures, particularly in the Muslim world. Even private citizens can, through contacts through travel and through education, promote an image of America that is not one sided, but also shows Americans who work hard, look after their families, go to church, subscribe to the traditional values shared by all the major religions. I think if the Islamic world saw this "other America," the real America, it would diminish the attraction of the Islamic radicals and terrorists.
WT: You argue that the classic liberalism of the founding fathers has been usurped by a modern liberalism that no longer reflects traditional American values. How so?
DD: The classical liberalism of the founders is defined by the freedom to vote, freedom to assemble, religious freedom and other individual liberties. This is a liberalism that has vast support around the world including with the majority of Muslims. But the classical liberalism of the 18th century is very different than the liberalism of the 1960s which emphasizes a whole different set of values such as sexual freedom, gay rights, rights for pornographers, the right to blaspheme and so on. According to this new liberalism, rights are best protected at their outer extremes. What modern liberalism does is take the traditional idea and give it a radical treatment that is controversial anywhere in the world outside Europe, Canada, Australia and the U.S. If you try to defend these values in any Muslim country, not just Saudi Arabaia and Iran, you will find that the reaction is unmitigated outrage.
WT: The title of your recent book – The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11 (Doubleday, 2007) – is surely designed to get people talking and sell books but it might also turn off the very people you're trying to reach. What's the main point you want liberals to understand?
DD: The title is provocative, and, looking back, it had a mixed effect. It turned off people on the left, including some well-meaning liberals. I meant the title to contest the simplistic idea of a clash of civilizations. If you were to write a book today called "The Enemy Within: Hitler, Nazi Germany and European Appeasement," it would be completely non-controversial. Such a book would not be denying that Hitler was the one who invaded Poland and France. Rather it would be raising the questions of how did Hitler become so strong during the 1930s? What emboldened him to take those actions in the confidence that he could get away with it? Why did he feel that he could be so aggressive with impunity? Here is where European appeasement clearly played a role. In the same vein, I am arguing that it is both liberal foreign policy and liberal cultural values that has strengthened the hand of the radical Muslims and emboldened them to strike at us in the serene confidence that they could do so with impunity. I wanted to emphasize that there is a social and cultural dimension to this conflict. If you read the literature and listen to the sermons delivered in the mosques. You realize that their main theme isn't that U.S. Foreign policy is pernicious but that Islam is under attack. That is the sense in which the cultural left is complicit in 9/11.
WT: Why do you suppose the book has attracted such virulent criticism from political pundits and reviewers?
DD: I certainly expected a little bit of an angry reaction from the Left -- in part, because I was pointing a finger. Oddly enough, this is the first book that generated controversy on the right; some saw it as too pro-Muslim. Islam is seen by one wing of the right as the problem. You see that even in the use of the term Islamo-Fascist. I took some heat from the conservative side for not letting all of the Muslims have it.
WT: In your lecture, you argued that if given the opportunity to democratically choose their leaders, many non-democratic Muslim countries would vote for more conservative or fundamentalist candidates (i.e. Al Queda would win more votes than the Saudi Royal family in a fair election). With the assumption that a terrorist network would likely not be a very effective governing body, does this imply that these countries are not ready for democracy?
DD: No, it doesn't mean that at all. In the short term, a combination of their bad leaders and our unwise policies have given them a difficult choice. Yes, if you're choosing between a secular tyranny on one hand and Iran-style Islamic tyranny on the other hand, some might choose Iran-style Islamic tyranny, but that's just because they have bad choices. It's not that they're not ready for democracy; it's just that they're living in a distorted situation.
WT: When asked, during your Whitworth lecture, what advice you would give the Bush White House, you drew a big laugh by responding, "That would be like being a mosquito at a nude beach. Where do you start?" So, where would you start?
DD: The first piece of advice I would give is to stop focusing so much on finding secular liberal allies in the Muslim world. There just aren't very many of those people, and if they're there, they don't have much of a constituency. Rather, I'd like to see the administration focus more on the traditional Muslims who are the majority in the Muslim world and who could, by themselves, crush the radical Muslim if they exercise their power. You can't win the war on terror if you don't do this. I see this as an area where the United States is not acting consciously enough and comprehensively enough.
WT: How does your latest book, What's So Great About Christianity (Regnery, 2007), respond to atheistic arguments in recent best-sellers by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and others?
DD: I take the atheism argument seriously because, for the first time, it has wide appeal, particularly among young people. The main arguments atheists make against Christianity are intellectual and moral. My book attempts to answer and refute the atheist claims on both counts. For example, they look at religion as the source of most of the conflict throughout history. I think their line of reasoning is flawed. The crimes of religion are exaggerated, and the crimes of atheist regimes are downplayed.
WT: What do you think is behind the recent spate of atheistic books?
DD: They're motivated in part because many of the atheists thought that religion was withering away; in fact the opposite is happening. Religion is booming. All of this has startled the atheists. They've realized that the end of religion isn't going to happen on its own.
WT: How do you feel about being compared to C.S. Lewis?
DD: I certainly wouldn't compare myself to Lewis. I admire him and, in some ways, my book is modeled very loosely on Mere Christianity. I'm quite taken by the fact that Lewis came out of academia as a scholar of medieval literature, yet he recognized that there were some very pressing questions that emerged out of World War II, and that they needed to be addressed in a public way. Likewise, atheists like Christopher Hitchens have raised some serious questions and there's a real need to answer them. I'm in a position to offer a public response.
WT: In an earlier book, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, you argue that political correctness is chilling freedom of thought and expression on American campuses. Does your criticism apply to schools like Whitworth as much as the ones analyzed in your book?
DD: The focus of my book was the secular liberal campus. My argument wasn't that these campuses promote an orthodoxy. I'm not against the idea of promoting an orthodoxy in principle, but that these campuses pretend to be open minded where, in fact, they are not being so. So you might have a campus like, take a somewhat extreme example, Bob Jones University, which has a very clear point of view and makes everybody sign a statement and so on, but you understand when you go in there that you're supposed to subscribe to these views; it's sort of a truth in advertising. On the other hand, when you go to a liberal campus they always tell you ‘we believe in being open-minded; we welcome a diversity of perspectives, we, in fact, think that challenging a point of view is particularly beneficial to your education.' So, there is a sort of illiberalism masking itself as liberalism.
WT: How does a person become one of the preeminent conservative voices of his time? Did you get a really good internship in college?
DD: I don't know if I can claim that title. There's a conservative movement out there, but I'm a pretty independent guy. As someone who was raised in another culture, growing up in Bombay, India, I'm able to see America both from the inside and also, to some degree, from the outside. I hope that gives my work a little more of an enlarged perspective. And I try to write in a way that says something that hasn't already been said, that's new. I've taken on a very wide field – the meaning of America.
WT: What are you working on next?
DD: I'm at a fork in the road. I've been a secular political writer for 15 years and I've enjoyed that work. Now, my latest book on Christianity is really having a big impact. The question is whether to return to the political world or to devote the next few years to pursuing the model of C.S. Lewis – trying to bring into the public square a new kind of apologetics that relates Christianity to the world around us.
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