Free The Enemy At Home by Dinesh D'Souza Page B

to the far left. Here I focus not on elected officials but on scholars and writers because they tend to provide the clearest, most coherent expression of the liberal mind. My goal is to convey the views of the liberal mainstream, while also taking note of what influential figures on the left flank have to say.
    America’s history of oppression is partly to blame.
In the liberal view, 9/11 was a tragic but understandable response to a long history of Western—and specifically American—conquest and oppression. In a November 2001 speech at Georgetown University, former president Bill Clinton traced the roots of 9/11 to “the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem…and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim.” Clinton added, “That story is still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it.” Clinton also invoked America’s history of owning slaves and dispossessing native Indians to make the point that America has terrorized others in the past and therefore should not be surprised when it is terrorized in return. 5
    As the slogan has it, what goes around comes around. The official liberal term for this is “blowback,” which refers to the hot fumes of rage that America’s policies produce in the non-Western world. Left-wing icon Noam Chomsky writes, “During the past several hundred years the U.S. annihilated the indigenous population, conquered half of Mexico, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines, and in the past half-century particularly, extended its force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal.” In Chomsky’s view, “the U.S. itself is a leading terrorist state” and 9/11 was simply a form of payback. “For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way.” 6
    Chomsky is a somewhat extreme example, but what one detects in his analysis is a certain relish in 9/11, the satisfaction of witnessing a kind of rough justice. We can detect a similar sense of vindication in the analysis of author and activist Arundhati Roy: “The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card…signed by the ghosts of the victims of America’s old wars: the millions killed in Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia, the thousands killed when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the tens of thousands of Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Panama at the hands of dictators whom the American government supported…and supplied with arms.” 7
    They hate us because of the destructive effects of current American foreign policy
. Quite apart from what America has done in the past, many liberals argue that America’s policies today are increasing the volume of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world and thus making 9/11 attacks more likely. “The United States is hated across the Islamic world because of specific U.S. government policies and actions,” Michael Scheuer writes. The same note is struck by Richard Falk, a professor of international law. “Why do they hate us?” Falk asks. He proceeds to inform us that Muslim animus is directed against “the U.S. government, its policies and ties with oppressive forces in the region, its decade-long sanctions imposed on the Iraqi people, its refusal to normalize relations with Iran, and above all, its underwriting of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and support for Israeli brutality directed against the Palestinians.” 8
    The “oppressive forces” that Falk refers to are the undemocratic regimes that America supports in countries like Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. In the liberal view, Muslims suffer under these despotic regimes and the radical Muslims are able to increase their popular support by positioning themselves against these tyrannical rulers and their American