Scott Johnson, who blogs for Powerline, gives fellow conservative Dinesh D'Souza's new book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, a well-deserved beating in this review. Johnson writes:
"The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11"--Mr. D'Souza's new book--is something else entirely. The book works a strange metamorphosis. Whereas "Illiberal Education" and "The End of Racism" proved Mr. D'Souza a precocious commentator and gifted polemicist, the new book is crude and sophomoric. Worse than its sophomoric treatment of serious issues is its presentation of a blinkered and politically correct version of the Muslim world.When you're attacked by fellow conservatives like this, you know you did something wrong. With this hideous book, we can safely say that Dinesh D'Souza is now in the same orbit with Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and other right-wing nut cases.
...The charge is serious, even if Mr. D'Souza's invocation of Joe McCarthy belies its seriousness. And the list is long. Does Mr. D'Souza prove his case? Although prosecutors are famously able to get grand juries to indict ham sandwiches, I don't think that Mr. D'Souza's indictment would make it out of a grand jury room. Mr. D'Souza simply lacks any evidence to sustain the charge connecting "the visceral rage," as Mr. D'Souza calls it, of the Muslims who carried out 9/11 to "the cultural left" that supposedly provoked it. Given the disparity between the seriousness of the charge and the thinness of the evidence, the book is a disgrace.
...Mr. D'Souza is neither a historian nor a student of Islam. His research is neither broad nor deep. He refers in passing to interviews he conducted for the book, but he does not appear to have interviewed many scholars, journalists, or witnesses who have devoted themselves to the subjects that bear on his book's thesis.
