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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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The Enemy
At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 by Dinesh D’Souza |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Values Dineh
D’Souza’s premise in The Enemy
At Home comes down to this: the cultural left in America by promoting
sexual promiscuity, an aversion to religion and policies that are anti-family,
so enflamed those who embrace Islamic values that it must be held responsible
for what happened on 9/11. D’Souza’s intention in writing what he knew would
be a controversial book was to open the debate on those aspects of American
culture that can foment hatred of our country and can explain why some
consider our nation to be the Great Satan. Here’s an excerpt, from the
beginning of Chapter 3, “America Through Muslim Eyes: Why Foreign Policy Is
Not the Main Problem,” pp. 68-73: It is supremely difficult for
Westerners—especially Americans—to understand the Muslim world. One reason,
of course, is the embarrassingly poor level of knowledge that many Americans
have of other cultures. The writer Salman Rushdie gives the example of his
sister, who was asked on several occasions in Such ignorance is
sometimes reflected at official levels. In 1949, on the occasion of
Thanksgiving, President Truman decided to present the president of More recent, and
potentially more harmful, is former Equally remarkable
is columnist and former presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan’s insistence
that a written constitution is unlikely to work in The deeper problem,
even for Americans who take the trouble to learn something about the Muslim
world, is ethnocentrism. Although it is liberals—usually of the academic
type—who like to complain about ethnocentrism, the problem affects Americans
across the political spectrum. In fact, as we will see, it is especially egregious
among liberals. Ethnocentrism simply means that we see others through the
lens of our preexisting, homegrown prejudices. Regarding our own ways and
values as normative and right, we are quick to find the customs and beliefs
of others to be strange and ridiculous. We simply don’t know why foreigners
do what they do, and so we make sweeping inferences about them that are
unjust and wrong. In some cases, we simply project our assumptions and values
onto other cultures, presuming that their motives and goals must be identical
with what ours would have been in a given situation. Ethnocentrism is a
universal tendency. Students who take courses in multiculturalism have heard
a great deal about Western ethnocentrism, and indeed Western historical
writing offers many examples of it. For hundreds of years Europeans referred
to Muslims as “Mohammedans” because they erroneously presumed that Muhammad
occupies the same position in Islam that Christ does in Christianity. There
is also a tradition in the West, more characteristic of the modern than the
Christian era, of viewing the East as mysterious, exotic, and inferior—a
tendency that Edward Said called “Orientalism.”5 What Said ignores,
however, is the equally long tradition in Muslim historiography of viewing
the West as unmysterious, unexotic, but no less inferior. Said’s work
illustrates an unfortunate tendency in Western multicultural scholarship to
deplore the sins of Western culture while ignoring or justifying the same (or
greater) offenses in non-Western cultures. The point here is
that other cultures—not only Islamic culture but also Hindu culture and
Chinese culture—also give striking displays of ethnocentrism. When Jesuit
missionaries first arrived in The Chinese may
appear from this example to be amusingly unsophisticated, yet we all adopt a
reference point that privileges our own position in space and time. When we
speak of the “ Moreover, terms
such as “Middle Ages” or “Dark Ages” do not have the same connotation outside
Western civilization that they do within it. Recently historian Joseph Ellis
accused Islamic fundamentalists of trying to take Muslims back to the “Dark
Ages.”6 Apparently Ellis doesn’t know—or simply forgot—that the
Dark Ages were not dark in the Muslim world. In fact, the period between 700
A.D. and 1500 A.D. was the golden age of Islamic civilization. From the point
of view of Muslim historians, the Islamic world was civilization itself and beyond
Islam’s borders were only barbarians. This Islamic
perception may strike us as arrogant, but historian Bernard Lewis writes that
this arrogance was “not without justification.” As historian Albert
Hourani shows in A History of the Arab
Peoples, the great culture of Islam radiated outward from its great
cities: Ethnocentrism is
not only a problem in understanding history; it also inhibits us from
understanding contemporary events, such as those leading up to 9/11. For
example, it is an article of faith, at least among conservatives, that the
West won the Cold War against what Reagan justly termed the “evil empire.”
But bin Laden strenuously disputes the premise. His view, echoed by other
radical Muslims, is that by pushing the Soviet Union out of To some degree
ethnocentrism is unavoidable, because human beings have no alternative to
viewing the world through some background set of assumptions and beliefs. If
ethnocentrism cannot be completely overcome, however, the scope of its errors
can be reduced and minimized. The way to do this is to turn assumptions into
questions. We should always be aware of the blinders that ethnocentrism
places on our minds. We should listen open-mindedly to what the Muslims have
to say, trying to understand them as they understand themselves. We should
try to make sense even of the people and practices that seem most outlandish
to us, such as Muslims who seek divine rule in the modern world or Muslim men
who marry multiple wives. Equally important,
we should try and see ourselves as they see us. In doing this we should
recognize that they, too, are viewing us somewhat ethnocentrically, through
the lens of their assumptions and beliefs. Even so, we should carefully
consider what our critics and enemies say, even when what they say is harsh.
We cannot content ourselves with goofball expressions of innocence, such as
President Bush’s profession of disbelief that there are people in other
parts of the world who hate Contrary to the
multicultural mantra, true understanding does not involve a suspension of
judgment about other cultures, or a double standard that routinely condemns
Western culture and exalts non-Western cultures. Rather, it involves a
willingness to critically and open-mindedly evaluate other cultures as well
as our own culture. In some cases, this involves a quest for an independent
or universal standard of evaluation to assess others as well as ourselves.
Although sometimes challenging, these efforts are indispensable to helping us
comprehend better why the Muslims do what they do, so that we can more
intelligently resolve what we should do about them. Any
reader who wants to think about America’s position in the world in a
comprehensive way will want to gain insight from the point of view expressed
in The
Enemy at Home. For some readers, take some blood pressure medication
before reading too much at a single sitting. Steve
Hopkins, June 20, 2008 |
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2008 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the July 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Enemy at Home.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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