Why do they REALLY hate us?

Mark Steyn is brilliant as usual, although for once he may actually be wrong. His review of Dinesh D’Souza’s new book is, at the time of writing, still here. Here though he wanders off-key a little.

Where I part company is in his belief that this will make any difference to the war on terror. In what feels like a slightly dishonest passage, the author devotes considerable space to the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual progenitor of what passes for modern Islamist “thought”. “Qutb became fiercely anti-American after living in the United States,” writes D’Souza without once mentioning where or when this occurred: New York in the disco era? San Francisco in the summer of love? No.

It was 1949 – the year when America’s lascivious debauched popular culture produced Doris Day, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and South Pacific. And the throbbing pulsating nerve center of this sewer of sin was Greeley, Colorado, where Sayyid Qutb went to a dance: “The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips…”

As I wrote in Maclean’s a couple of months back: “In 1949, Greeley, Colorado, was dry. The dance was a church social. The feverish music was Frank Loesser’s charm song ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’…” Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban introduced it in the film Neptune’s Daughter.
Look, if it would persuade ‘em to hang up the old suicide-bomber belts, I’d lay off the Tupac CDs and Charlie Sheen sitcoms and Britney Spears navel piercings. But you’ll have to prise “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” from my cold dead hands and my dancing naked legs. As I said back then, “A world without ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ will be very cold indeed.”

From a sophisticated writer, the central proposition of this book is absurd - that western conservatives should make common cause with “moderate Muslims”. That would be merely the inversion of the freakshow alliance between the godless left and the jihadists embodied bythe participation in one of the big “anti-war” rallies of a group called “Queers For Palestine”.

“Moderate” Islam is preferable to jihadism, has many admirable qualities and many less so. But attempting to align our social values with theirs would be the right’s strain of appeasement and just as doomed. The reality is that Islam sees our decadence not as a threat but as an opportunity. For the west to reverse the gains of the cultural left would not endear us to Islam but would make us better suited to resisting its depradations. We should reject Britney because she’s rubbish not as a geopolitical strategy.

I somehow doubt D’Souza is quite right to blame the American cultural Left for 9/11. Ditto President Bush though, when he claims that Islamists attack the West because they hate "freedom". It’s true that they hate the so-called “Free World”, and for them “freedom” means the selfishness and immorality of the Kafir. But it’s not the freedom per se that they hate. Stalin hated the Free World as well, but he ended up hating Hitler more simply because Hitler was nearer. Contrary to what both the Left and the Right will say about most issues, if you want to understand politics and religion and the roles they play on the global stage in the world today, don’t think ideologically but strategically.

On the other hand, I’m fairly sure I’d have found sexual mores in the 1940s and ’50s in America and in Britain fairly appalling. It’s one thing to compare the old maids of the post-War era with the porn-peddlers of the MSM today, and to be fair things did change quite a bit for the worse in a period when Mary Whitehouse went from being a rightwing busybody to being a universal figure of fun and then of scorn, fear and loathing, to finally being dead (as she remains to this day!). But the Sexual Revolution didn’t start in the post-War era, let alone in the 1960s. Rather its modern intellectual and activist roots go back to the late Victorian period, and its big break came with the Great War. Though there was a conservative backlash in the 1930s (and in some places then some – Germany for example!) it was more a “cultural” phenomenon than a societal rejection of the new freedoms (suffrage for women, and so on) and the New Morality. (The Catholic Legion of Decency was founded in 1933, for example, and lasted until it was effectively abolished by Vatican II. The Hays Code started to be enforced at about the same time, and continued until it too was abolished in the 1960s. Both were concerned with Hollywood’s output, and have done much to sanitize our views of the interwar years, but in the long run they achieved not much else besides.)

Would I swap Britney Spears, or even Mae West, for the sake of a quiet life in the face of Muslim terrorism? You betcha, baby!

I just don’t think it would work.

UPDATE: The Ricardo Montalban in the video is of course the same Ricardo Montalbán who went on to become both Khan Noonien Singh and a papal knight.