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Mona Charen: Is It All About Britney?

May 26, 2009 5:29 am By Robert Spencer

In her May 22 column “Is It All About Britney?” (thanks to Boneshack), columnist Mona Charen takes down Dinesh D’Souza’s ridiculous 2006 book The Enemy At Home, which I discussed here and in many other places at Jihad Watch.

In his book “The Enemy at Home,” Dinesh D’Souza shows little patience with the leftists who reacted to 9/11 by declaring that America had it coming. And yet, his book is a variant on that theme. It was our cultural decadence, our foul popular movies, music and pornography, D’Souza argues, that enraged traditional Muslims worldwide and moved some to violence….

For the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that America’s cultural exports in the form of movies and music are the principal cause of Muslim hatred of the United States. This cultural rot did not set in, D’Souza acknowledges, until after the 1960s. Yet the godfather of the radical movement that spawned Osama bin Laden was the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, who formed his fanatical beliefs after living in the United States in the late 1940s .

Qutb was offended by everything about America, from its food to its delight in football and money, and particularly by what he saw as sexual libertinism. “Jazz is the American music,” Qutb wrote, “created by Negroes to satisfy their primitive instincts “” their love of noise and their appetite for sexual arousal.” Attending a church social in (dry) Greeley, Colo., in 1949, Qutb was revolted by what he saw: “Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips, and the atmosphere was full of love.”

So the America Qutb despised was one that most conservatives consider pretty tame. Yet it was to his eyes a sewer. This suggests the cultural divide between American conservatives and Muslim conservatives is more like a chasm. D’Souza speaks approvingly of traditional Muslims seeking to “preserve the innocence of their children,” perhaps forgetting that throughout large swaths of the Muslim world, child brides are quite acceptable. When Khomeini took power in Iran, the marriage age for girls was reduced to 9. It has since been increased all the way to 13.

There are other troubling aspects of traditional Muslim family life that D’Souza glosses over. The tradition of honor killing “” husbands, brothers and fathers killing their female relatives who engage in immodest behavior “” is widespread and uncontroversial in Muslim lands and even in Muslim communities in Europe. Temporary marriage permits Muslim men to “marry” any number of women, for as little as a couple of hours “” a barely disguised form of prostitution, which they piously condemn in the West. Rape victims are stoned to death, and so forth.

But even if the radical Muslims are truly enraged by American decadence and see it as an assault on traditional Muslim values “” by what stretch of the imagination do they take to suicide attacks as a response? That’s some movie review. Besides, no one holds a gun to their heads and forces them to buy the output of Paramount and Time Warner. One can easily imagine a country in the Middle East excluding such things, unencumbered as they are by a First Amendment….

Yes. Read it all.

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