My book The Enemy at Home is producing a lively debate on both the left and the right. The book takes on the cherished assumptions of both sides, so I’m not entirely surprised. Most of the attacks from the left, such as that of Alan Wolfe in the New York Times and Jerry Adler in Newsweek have been pure personal abuse, without a single serious argument. For instance Wolfe faults me with being a secret admirer of Bin Laden, a claim so ridiculous that like the mosquito at the nudist colony, I’m not sure where to begin!

It is typical of Wolfe that he demeans me in every ad hominem way, suggesting at one point that my career has “fallen on hard times.” This is odd considering---a) I’m at Stanford University and he’s at Boston College, and b) my new book has just hit the New York Times bestseller list, my fourth book to do so, while Wolfe’s books sell mainly to his fellow sociologists. Wolfe is typical of many professors I frequently debate on campus, a man educated beyond his intelligence.

But other critics, mainly from the conservative side, have raised substantive questions that deserve an answer. In some cases, they are knocking straw-man arguments, so I’d like to clarify a few things that my book does, and does not, say.

D’Souza is justifying 9/11 by saying the American left is responsible for it. This accusation is made by my Hoover colleague Victor Davis Hanson. Actually, I argue that the left sowed the seeds of 9/11 by helping radical Islam gain control of a major state, Iran, and then by emboldening Bin Laden during the 1990s to strike with the full confidence that America was weak and cowardly and would not respond in a resolute manner. Didn’t Jimmy Carter, by withdrawing American support for the Shah of Iran, helped Khomeini’s rise to power? Wasn’t Khomeini the first Muslim leader to call America the Great Satan, and to counsel a worldwide jihad against America? And didn’t Clinton’s failure to respond to a whole series of radical Muslim attacks in the mid to late 1990s persuade Bin Laden that America was a paper tiger and that he could strike with impunity? Absent these failures of liberal foreign policy, I don’t believe 9/11 would have happened. Not a single one of my critics has contested this. Hanson maintains a Sphinx-like silence on the subject. So my book is showing the historical roots of 9/11, not excusing it. Explanation is not the same thing as justification.

But doesn’t this take the blame off the radical Muslims, who did 9/11? This seems to be the worry of blogger Scott Johnson of Powerline, who says that his first reaction to my book was one of “nausea.” But I say on the first page of my book that I am not making the absurd argument that the cultural left knocked down the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. Bin Laden and the Islamic radicals did that, and they are the guilty party. The role of the cultural left is in fueling the volcano of anger toward America in the Muslim world, and thus in helping the radical Muslims win recruits to their bloody cause. My argument is very similar to saying that British and French appeasement in the 1930s helped to consolidate the position of Hitler and emboldened him to invade France and Poland. Hitler gets the full blame for his actions, while Neville Chamberlain and others are responsible for paving his way. So too the Bin Laden team carried out the terrorist attacks, but liberal policies and secular values projected abroad are responsible for strengthening Bin Laden’s hand and his motivation to strike when he did.

Surely it’s ridiculous to blame Britney Spears and Hollywood for causing 9/11. Mona Charen and blogger Dean Barnett have faulted me with making this argument, which I do not make. To blame Britney for 9/11 would surely be overstating the importance of the bald one and the movie industry. What I do say, with a lot of supporting evidence, is that the excesses of American popular culture are producing a “blowback” of resistance, not only from the Muslim world, but also from the traditional cultures of Asia and Africa. A popular slogan across Asia today is “Modernization without Westernization.” What this means is that many people in countries want Western prosperity and technology but they don’t want what they perceive as Western values that they consider degrading and vulgar. Now this is the charge that the radical Muslims exploit. They accuse America of being an atheist, immoral society that is hell-bent on imposing its secularism and immorality on the Muslim world. I am not concerned with persuading the radical Muslims. But I am concerned that their charge is finding a receptive ear among traditional Muslims, who are the majority in the Muslim world. Radical Islam has swelled its ranks considerably in the past couple of decades by recruiting among the ranks of the traditional Muslims.

D’Souza agrees with Bin Laden that America is a new Gomorrah. Hanson and a few other critics have made this charge. But I would never have moved from India to America if I thought America was so bad. Anyone who has read my last book What’s So Great About America knows that I love the freedom that American provides and I fully recognize that freedom can be used well or it can be used badly. I’m not asking any American to change in order to appease the mullahs. But at the same time I do think that there are aspects of American popular culture that are shameless and degrading, and often it is this part of America that is exported abroad. Here in America we can distinguish between something we see on TV and the way Americans actually live. But the ordinary Muslim on the streets of Islamabad or Cairo sees the values of American popular culture, and to him those are the values of America. He cannot make a distinction, because this is the only America he is exposed to. So what the secular left promotes as progressive and liberating, many people in traditional cultures view as an assault on their religion and traditional morality. That’s why Bin Laden has been so successful in portraying America as the global leader of the unbelievers, and in calling on Muslims to rise up against it in defense of their religious and moral beliefs.

The only problem with this analysis is that Europe is more secular and decadent than America, so why is America the main target? This is a frequent point that I have had to answer in radio and TV interviews. It’s not a hard question to respond to. Of course there have been attacks on London and Madrid, so Europe has not escaped attack. But the reason the radical Muslims give for making America their main target—the Great Satan, if you will—is that it is American culture that is spreading promiscuously throughout the world. Young Muslims aren’t cracking Swedish jokes or watching French films. It is American values that are making their way into every nook and cranny of the world. And when we reflect upon the label of Great Satan, let us remember that Satan in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim tradition is not known for being a military conqueror. He is known for being a seducer and a tempter.

Radical Muslims like Sayyid Qutb hated the America of the 1950s, so how can anyone take this critique seriously? Mona Charen and Robert Spencer think they have scored a winning point here, but of course traditional Muslims did not take Qutb that seriously in the 1950s. Numerous historians have pointed out that America was quite popular in the Muslim world in the 1950s. And radical Islam had trouble getting recruits in that era. The point is that Qutb’s critique has become increasingly relevant as American culture has become increasingly permissive and shocking to the sensibilities of traditional people. So Qutb is read today against the backdrop of what Muslims see in today’s America, not 1950s America. For this reason Qutb is now viewed as a kind of prophet, someone who decades ago foresaw the rot behind America’s shiny global image. So Qutb now has “crossover” appeal to traditional Muslims, instead of dismissing him as a crank and a fool, we should be studying him to “know our enemy.”