The “True” Cause of Terrorism

Well, it’s official: Dinesh D’Souza’s newish tome, The Enemy at Home will join the list of the large number of books that we have not read but consider utter piffle. Yep: Throw Mr. D’Souza’s latest magnum opus right next to Norman Mailer’s infantile Hitler novel and the complete works of Barbara Ehrenreich.

Perhaps you’re blissfully unaware of Mr. D’Souza’s new book. If so, aren’t you a lucky sod? In short, Mr. D’Souza’s work blames the decadence of the Western political and cultural Left for 9/11. In his view, the trash culture and trash values of liberals are entirely to blame for Osama bin Laden’s evil.

To which we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” reply: Oh, shut up. That’s just absurd. Patently absurd.

Now don’t get us wrong, dear reader. We disdain trash culture as much as the next Tipper Gore. And we certainly buy the notion that such pernicious pabulum makes us look bad in the eyes of fundamentalist Neanderthals.

But to blame the cultural Left for 9/11 is simply insane. Worse yet, it manages to exonerate al Qaeda and its ilk from any and all blame. It was, you see, Steven Spielberg who made us do it. Don’t get mad at us; take it out on Britney Spears.

What a bunch of garbage. If you ask us, anyone who can definitively fill in the blank in the following sentence is an idiot: “The sole cause of Islamist terrorism is ______.”

Yep: Blithely add any individual answer to that phrase and you’re officially a dolt. In fact, that’s what makes both Dinesh D’Souza and Michael “Imperial Hubris” Scheuer such unhinged morons.

Dinesh, of course, would say “The sole cause of Islamist terrorism is the Western cultural Left.” Michael Scheuer, on the other hand, would say “The sole cause of Islamist terrorism is the existence of Israel.”

Presto! They’re both complete boobs.

Do you really need to be a genius to recognize that a phenomenon as complex as Islamist terrorism will not have one cause alone? Perhaps such an obvious truism won’t sell copies in the local Barnes & Ignoble. And it probably won’t get you booked on the Sunday chat shows. But it has the obvious benefit of being true.

Which is more than what we can say for the recent prattling of Dinesh D’Souza or anything Michael Scheuer has ever said. Whilst D’Souza replays the culture wars, Scheuer demonstrates his anti-Semitic bona fides. How, exactly, did these two fellows manage to get book contracts?