Terry, he explicitly "pointed a finger" (his words, not mine) in my face and the faces of people like me and said "you helped this happen." He declared that the blood of 2500 of my fellow New Yorkers, and another 500 of my countrymen is partly on my hands because I have the audacity to be a feminist and a liberal. He only took it back when the rest of civilized society screamed bloody murder. I'm not going to apologize for my beliefs and I don't believe Mr. Falwell was sincere when he recanted. The words first spoken, I believe, indicate the level of contempt he had for people like me.
I actually found D'Souza's argument to just be a baseless screed against the horrible dangers of people who dare to disagree with him. I've actually managed to forget most of the details of D'Souza's book, so thankfully the Washington Post's review was there to refresh my recollection. As the Post pointed out, there are horrible inaccuracies in his book - there are American troops in Mecca, Mr. D'Souza? Qaddafi stopped sponsoring terrorism in 1986, two years before the Lockerbie bombing? And D'Souza ignores every scrap of evidence that flatly contradicts his theory to make up an explanation out of whole cloth that not only explains the motivations of terrorists, but also conveniently blames it all on D'Souza's political enemies at home. Those awful, scary, evil, liberals.
The simple fact is that Northern Europe is way more liberal and secular than we are. So why didn't al Qaeda attack Sweden? Because Sweden doesn't have a blue water navy that covers the world, or bases on every continent. Sweden isn't seen as the principal power behind every government in the Arab world that al Qaeda hates. Sweden didn't have tens of thousands of troops based in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East's most sinister conspiracy theorists didn't spread the filthy lie that Israel is nothing more than a colonial outpost of Sweden, designed to take over and subjugate the Arab world.
We are hated because we are powerful. We are hated because our presence is felt all over the world. We are hated because if your government is incompetent and exploits its people and squanders its resources, it's much easier to blame some looming foreign hegemon with corrupt and sinister designs than to admit that people who don't demand better from their government often get pretty lousy leadership.
Don't get me wrong, they hate capitalism and consumerism, and liberalism and tolerance and feminism. But if the reason they attacked us was any of these, why didn't they bomb the French Riviera for its topless beaches? Or Rwanda, for having the audacity not just to let women vote, but for having a majority female parliament?
They don't even really care about the oppression of other Muslims. If they did, why wouldn't they attack China for its massive human rights violations against the Uighurs? Or France (yet again) for not just colonizing and exploiting the Muslim world, but for engaging in race and religion baiting vis a vis its own Arab/Muslim population?
It all comes down to power, not US domestic politics. The former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit said it a lot better than I could: "Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom, liberty, and democracy, but have everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world."
Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda tried to directly take on the governments in the Arab world that they hate. They failed. In the age of modern weaponry, after all, psycho fringe groups generally have a hard time overthrowing well armed, entrenched establishments. The fanatics then decided the best way to get these governments to collapse was to force the US to abandon its support for them. Without the US military there to protect the status quo, they wagered, eventually these unpopular governments could be toppled. This isn't mere speculation. Bin Laden himself, in his rambling, poorly written declarations, has laid out his "case" against the "near enemy" (i.e., the Arab governments) and the "far enemy" (i.e., America).
Bin Laden and his thugs thought that by attacking the US on its own soil, it would cause the "paper tiger" to retreat. They used the fiasco in Mogadishu, the USS Cole attack, and the attacks on our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya as exhibits A, B, C, and D in their case that if you hit the US forcefully, it would always retreat. They apparently didn't account for the fact that the US might react differently to being attacked at home.
Sorry if this comes across as overly touchy. I just get a little bent out of shape when people like D'Souza try to blame anyone but the totalitarian psychopaths who want to enforce their 7th century form of warlord driven barbarism on the rest of the world for the events of 9/11.
Rac
