D’Souza’s Trojan Horse — part 2

July 21, 2009 by Elan Journo

My first post on D’Souza looked at the central claim he puts forward about the enemy that struck us on 9/11. D’Souza would have us believe that Islamic terrorism is some sort of excessive, but at its source justifiable, cultural self-defense by an affronted people. I wrote

This is why D’Souza complains that the Wahhabi strain of Islam, the totalitarian ideology of Saudi Arabia and the wellspring of much Islamist terrorism, has gotten a bad rap. “This may come as news to some conservatives, but Wahhabi Islam is not a breeding ground of Islamic radicalism,” D’Souza writes. “It is a breeding ground of Islamic obedience. The essence of the Wahhabi doctrine is doctrinal and social conservatism.”

It is an analogous lack of “social conservatism” in America today that provokes D’Souza’s disgust — and it is here that the author’s real agenda begins to poke through the flimsy pretense at counseling on national security.

D’Souza rails against secularism as an enemy and a barrier because, in his fantasy, America is inherently a society like that of Muslims — it is rooted, he thinks, in “traditional” values of patriarchy and godly morality. He blames the American cultural left for causing America’s decadence — through secularism.

What D’Souza and the jihadists both hate is the scientific, this-worldly autonomous judgment of individuals who are masters of their own fate, not self-made slaves to a religious authority. This is what inspires both the overt hatred in Osama Bin Laden and his minions and the crudely disguised hatred in D’Souza. Bin Laden damns Americans for being a

nation who, rather than ruling by the sharia of Allah in its Constitution and laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority in the lord and your creator. You are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind.

D’Souza damns Americans for choosing to live according to their personal goals rather than in unthinking obedience to “traditional” ways of living:

Today many American mothers work, not because they have to, but because they want to. Many mothers choose to have a career because it is more self-fulfilling than the life of a fulltime mom. . . . And when the fetus gets in the way of a pregnant woman’s plans for her life, even abortion becomes a mode of self-fulfillment.

It is repugnant to D’Souza that a woman should decide how to spend her time, choose her own profession, control her own life, and prevent an unintended pregnancy from determining her future. He paints this as unavoidably irrational, because it puts the individual’s own life and judgment first. D’Souza’s ideal is submission to some end beyond oneself, to some “higher” authority. Substitute the corresponding Islamic phrasing for this Christian ethos, and you have the sentiment that Bin Laden and his horde espouse and act to realize.

Like the jihadists, D’Souza believes that society ought to mirror life in a patriarchal family. At home, the father’s word is binding law upon his spouse and offspring, regardless of what they judge to be true and right. Likewise in society, God’s word must be binding law upon all mankind, regardless of what men believe–theirs is not to make reply, not to reason why, but only to do and die. Ever mindful of his American audience, D’Souza strives to put a cheerful face on the repugnant “traditional values” that he claims we have in common with Muslims, who engage in “honor killings,” female circumcision, tribal blood-feuds, and blind obedience to scripture. For instance, he suggests that the patriarchal society isn’t all that bad for women; though a woman is regarded as her spouse’s inferior and treated like chattel, she can domineer in her own, womanly, way:

I can testify from personal experience that traditional systems of this sort do not breed passive, submissive women. My two grandmothers were both tyrants who ruled over their husbands. Patriarchy doesn’t make women less powerful — it merely diverts their power to the domain of the household.

Could any woman ask for more?

Not wanting to scare off his readers, D’Souza hedges his reverence for religious life — a touch. For instance, he notes with a grin that clergymen on Iranian, Egyptian and Saudi television dole out guidance on the “permissible ways for a man to play with his beard,” whether “food may be consumed during intercourse,” and “under what circumstances it is acceptable to laugh in public.” He offers this with a qualification: “The regulations in Islamic countries covering sex and personal behavior are so detailed that they sometimes reach the level of the absurd.” Only sometimes — since he sees conformity with most such regulations as the necessary protection against the bane of “individualism,” which he improperly lumps together with rampant subjectivism.

Muslims hate us, D’Souza would have us believe, because our ungodly society affronts what he regards as their noble ideals and culture. The solution, he claims, lies in his political program to redeem America.

What’s the actual nature of that program? I’ll discuss that in a followup post.