A Certain Anger
S. M. Hutchens on Secularists Who Don’t Get Hell & Terrorists Who Do
In The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (2007), Dinesh D’Souza places the heaviest part of the blame for Islam’s hatred of the United States on the American left. The perception of many Muslims that this country is the fountainhead of world-pervasive satanic influences that corrupt morals and degrade human life, he indicates, is not irrational. The importations about which they are so angry—those which normalize sexual promiscuity, attack the integrity of the family, encourage rebellion of the young, mock legitimate authority, and glorify feminism and homosexuality—are largely the products, D’Souza indicates, of the well-financed, media-encouraged cultural aggression of the left.
Muslims, however, are not the only ones who perceive the evil in left-wing religion and its media evangelists. These same influences are also condemned by traditional Jews and Christians as inimical to divine law, humane ethics, and a value system that is both ancient and universal. The primary vision of the United States impressed upon Muslims, however, and which their more warlike leaders have had no difficulty in exploiting, is not that of a nation with the soul of a church, but the one promoted by a world-pervasive secularist media that routinely ignores, caricatures, or derides people of faith, and that is particularly offended by the restrictive sexual ethic upon which they will reliably insist.
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S. M. Hutchens is a Touchstone senior editor.
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