Osama bin Laden and the American left have forged a tacit agreement to secure the defeat of the United States in Iraq. That’s premise number one in Dinesh D’Souza’s book, The Enemy at Home. A second major assertion is that the global war against Islamic radicalism is linked to the Red-Blue culture war at home—and that success in the first struggle is linked to aggressive engagement in the second. A third proposition links victory in the global war on Islamic radicalism to a values alliance between American conservatives and traditional Muslims—an alliance that deplores not only acts of terror but also the libertine culture that Blue America is exporting around the world.

D'Souza readily concedes that the American left and Muslim radicals have vastly different strategic objectives. The former seek to make the U.S., and eventually the world, safe for pornography (that is, for secular liberalism’s vision of individual autonomy), while the latter want to establish Sharia throughout the Middle East, then elsewhere. At present, however, a marriage of convenience exists between the atheistic left and Islamic terrorists—since both sides see their power enhanced by hanging a Vietnam-style defeat on President Bush in Iraq.

D'Souza buttresses his strange-bedfellows thesis by noting that Osama bin Laden's pre-election message in 2004 was largely indistinguishable from the rhetoric employed by leftists like Michael Moore--the man who shared Jimmy Carter's box at that year’s Democratic Convention. Moreover, as the author observes, “If you presume that [leftists] want Bush to win and bin Laden to lose the war on terror, their rhetoric and actions are utterly baffling. By contrast, if you presume that they want bin Laden to win and Bush to lose the war, then their statements and actions make perfect sense.”

Put succinctly, the American left wants George Bush, and thus the U.S., to lose the war in Iraq because it “fears Bush more than bin Laden.” For leftists, the enemy at home threatens to tip the balance of judicial power toward traditional jurisprudence. Consequently, a new foreign policy debacle is needed to discredit conservatives, unite liberals, and consolidate power in the hands of justices whose decisions regularly undermine time-honored beliefs. The left’s first priority, in other words, is to defeat the “Christian fascists” in America—those folks who oppose abortion and gay marriage, and who embrace standards of propriety that (except for Europe and Blue America) are recognized around the globe. If Iraqis must suffer and die under an Iran-style regime to secure this domestic objective, so be it.

Osama bin Laden, for his part, is happy to have American allies whose short-term foreign policy objectives coincide with his own—even if the secular left is precisely the group pushing a worldwide cultural agenda that is anathema to both Al Qaeda and traditional Muslims. This antipathy of traditional Muslims to secularism's imperial march is a fact largely ignored by conservatives seeking allies in the misnamed “war on terror.” D’Souza observes that Islamic radicals from Sayyid Qutb to Osama have fervently denounced the seductive power of American television, movies, music, and mores--and that both radical and not-so-radical Muslims view this cultural invasion as a mortal threat to Islam. Moreover, due to the quantity and prominence of its cultural exports, the U.S. is seen as the focus of Western decadence—“the head of the snake.” Neither political imperialism nor America’s support for Israel is viewed with similar existential dread.

To emphasize this point, D’Souza provides a stark portrait of American cultural depravity—an undertaking unprecedented among foreign policy analysts. Indeed, D’Souza's detailed examples--from gangsta' rap to Howard Stern to The Vagina Monologues--transform vapid words like “explicit” and “mature” into “when I see it” obscenities that would curl Potter Stewart’s toenails. D'Souza's descent into this cultural abyss is designed to view these "entertainments" through the eyes of traditional cultures. Unlike Western liberals, Muslims in Iraq, Egypt, or Indonesia don’t equate freedom with flagrant violations of traditional morality. Indeed, for them, as for Red America, laws that bolster families with a father, a mother, and children seem natural and sensible—whereas a society that legalizes pornography, sexualizes children, makes abortion-on-demand a fundamental right, and puts a stamp of approval on homosexual unions seems deranged. Yet the latter is the society that leftists, via their Hollywood cohorts, are foisting on cultures around the world.

Popular resistance, D’Souza observes, forces leftists to employ U.N. agencies and Soros-sponsored NGOs to do to traditional cultures what they’ve already done to America. In this effort pliable dictators often serve the left’s purposes better than democracies—a fact illustrated by war critics’ nostalgia for Saddam’s “equal rights for women” tyranny. Cultural liberalism and democracy, the author notes, are distinct concepts, and leftists have always been willing to ditch democracy to achieve their ideological goals.

The head-spinning irony of D’Souza’s presumed compact between leftists and Islamic radicals is that Westerners who despise Islam as much as they hate traditional Christians, find themselves on the side of “redeployment”—a policy whose likely result will be the victory of radicals in Iraq. Conversely, Islamic radicals are content to empower abroad a group that sponsors aggressive global secularization. The upside of this deal for team-Osama, however, goes beyond the plum of Iraq, since its consummation highlights American weakness. Moreover, as secular liberals again assume power in America, it becomes easier to convince traditional Muslims that the U.S., like the Soviet Union, is a drunken giant ready to collapse. After all, D’Souza argues, leftist foreign policy prior to 9/11 conveyed just this impression to Muslim radicals.

The foremost example of American weakness was President Carter’s disastrous decision to withdraw support from the Shah of Iran—a move that paved the way for the first Islamic state. Likewise, Clinton's abrupt withdrawal from Somalia in 1993, after eighteen troops were killed in Mogadishu, inspired bin Laden to depict Americans as cut-and-run cowards. In 1998, the same President’s ineffective, Monica-timed cruise missile response to devastating attacks against U.S. embassies in Africa was greeted with derision among Islamic radicals—as was Clinton's purely verbal response to an Al Qaeda orchestrated attack on the U.S.S. Cole that blasted "a forty-foot hole in the ship's hull and [killed] seventeen sailors.” Such fecklessness, D'Souza says, confirmed the radicals’ belief that America, despite its wealth and military assets, had lost the will to fight. And that conviction paved the way for 9/11.

Despite these withering critiques, D’Souza repeatedly defends the left against charges of anti-Americanism. Leftists, the author observes, promote their beliefs, just as conservatives do. Indeed, they are even willing to use military force, if necessary, to install a soul mate in Haiti. In the end, however, this defense is Pyrrhic—and may be offered to deflect criticism of his own audacious thesis. The left’s “America,” as D’Souza observes, is a country where patriotism and religion are suspect and where loyalty rests with international organizations. Indeed, its America is a nation that repudiates the traditional values cherished by most Americans up to, but not beyond, “the greatest generation.” (Janeane Garofalo, for example, gets “choked up with pride” when she sees “Not the flag, but a gay naked man or woman burning the flag.”) To argue in its defense that “the left wants America to be a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill,” is no defense at all. Even more to the point, leftists who want America to lose the war in Iraq and become like Europe are cosmopolitans, not patriots. They “love America” the same way Howard Zinn does—with reckless contempt.

D’Souza’s proposals for defeating the Al Qaeda-Michael Moore axis include persevering in the attempt to establish a democratic Iraq and highlighting the treacherous alliance that exists between Islamic radicals and the cultural left.. Also needed, but at present woefully lacking, is serious political focus on the values that Red America shares with Muslims around the world. Rather than demonizing Islam, defending the newly-minted right to blaspheme, and pushing dubious Western mores on reluctant Muslims, conservatives should denounce the corrupt culture promoted by the secular left and embrace the right of Muslims to configure democracies that reflect their religious and historical traditions. Instead of lecturing Arab women on the joys of chauffeurless driving, administration officials should join forces with them in conferences designed to showcase the devastation wrought by Western pop-culture. Only by highlighting the ideals cherished by Red America (natural rights and external moral standards) and repudiating the excesses of Blue America can conservatives hope to persuade traditional Muslims that at least half of the U.S. (the half despised by Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins) isn’t intent on destroying their faith.

That “traditional Muslims are the only people who are capable of stopping radical Islam” is a notion that’s bandied about in discussions of terrorism. D’Souza’s book, however, fleshes out the stark implications of that thought. Moderate or liberal Muslims, the author jokes, are already on our side—all eight of them. The remaining billion-plus, however, won’t be won over by plaintive denunciations of terrorism or by rapturous paeans to freedom—not as long as Muslims equate “freedom” with Western decadence and “terror” with the only practical means of resisting corruption. Nor will Muslims sign up to fight against fellow believers when reckless statements about their religion are made by supporters of a war against “Islamic fascism.” To win these hearts and minds, “democracy” and “freedom” must mean something other than MTV and rigidly enforced public secularism. And for this to happen, American rhetoric and policy, vis-à-vis traditional Islamic culture, must change.

Whether most Americans are capable of appreciating and adopting these intellectual distinctions is doubtful—as is their willingness to denounce, alongside Muslims, the decadent culture in which they have marinated for almost half a century. Certainly, American leftists and their media cohorts will dismiss D'Souza's ideas as the ravings of a McCarthyite theocrat. (The author provides a list of prominent leftists and leftist groups at the end of his book.) Moreover, assuming that the author's analysis of Islam’s traditional-radical split is accurate, it is far from clear that “traditionalists” who are now sitting on the political fence will cast their lot with a divided-against-itself country whose execrable cultural exports show no signs of changing.

Given these obstacles, D’Souza’s concession that his recommendations aren’t easy may qualify as the understatement of the post 9/11 century. Still, if traditional Muslims are, indeed, the key to stopping radical Islam, one wonders what other options are available to win their support.

Review by Richard Kirk

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer who lives in Oceanside, CA. He is a regular columnist for San Diego’s North County Times and has been published in several Southern California newspapers. His book reviews have appeared in The American Enterprise, First Things, Touchstone, The American Spectator Online, and the California Republic website. See his blog, Richard Kirk on Ethics: Musing With A Hammer.

“Sublimely non-tendentious,” that’s the phrase I’ve always attributed to Alfred North Whitehead—a man who began his career as a Cambridge mathematician collaborating with Bertrand Russell and ended that career as a Harvard philosopher and metaphysician. Two things you can count on when reading Whitehead. First, he will look at the big picture. Second, he will generously give to all historical players the credit due to them. I make these points to contrast Whitehead’s modus operandi with the scattershot pettiness that pervades Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion.

Here’s a sample taken from Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World—a stunningly insightful text based on the Lowell Lectures of 1925: “The Reformation and the scientific movement were two aspects of the [historical] revolt which was the dominant intellectual movement of the later Renaissance. The appeal to the origins of Christianity, and Francis Bacon’s appeal to efficient causes as against final causes, were two sides of one movement of thought.”

And again: “I do not think…that I have even yet brought out the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement. I mean the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope…. My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivation from medieval theology.”

To simplify, both the Reformation and modern science arose out of a “movement of thought” that, in the case of science, rebelled against final causes. Yet, ironically, the confidence that modern science displays in its intellectual project rests upon an unconscious faith in the universe’s detailed rationality that was derived from medieval theology.

Don’t look for anything like this kind of subtle analysis in The God Delusion. What you’ll find, instead, is page after sarcastic page of attacks against any foe Dawkins considers an easy target: Pat Robertson, Pastor Ted Haggard, Ann Coulter, a small fundamentalist school in Northeast England (to which 7 of Dawkins’ 374 pages are devoted), Pastor Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps, Dr. James Dobson, and, of course, G. W. Bush—who supposedly invaded Iraq because he was told to do so by God. Even poor Carl Jung is made into a kook by Dawkins for believing “that particular books on his shelf spontaneously exploded.” (I’ve read a number of works written by Freud’s unfaithful protégé and have yet to encounter the concept of spontaneous book combustion. Dawkins, however, as with the comment about President Bush and Iraq, doesn’t bother to provide references for these claims.)

When it comes to magnanimity, here’s a sample of the author’s generosity: “To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird.” This comment shows the contempt Dawkins consistently displays for ideas that don’t conform to his own—a bio-creed that includes the following affirmations: life emerged on earth due to random interactions of material elements; life evolved from its primitive forms to its current complexity because of natural selection; no god is needed to make sense of these (or any other) phenomena.

In truth, Dawkins’ entire book is an exercise in contempt—summarily dismissing Thomas Aquinas’ theological arguments and devoting less than 100 breezy pages to the whole issue of God’s existence. The rest of Dawkins’ book discusses—with the jaundiced eye of an H. L. Mencken in biological drag—how religious beliefs are given undue social deference, why Einstein’s references to God aren’t religious, why eastern religions aren’t religions, why religion developed (socio-biologically), how the Bible is a jumble of historical trash, how religion promotes intolerance and undermines science, how Hitler may have been Catholic, why Stalin’s atheism doesn’t matter, why society doesn’t need religion to be moral, why Jefferson was probably an atheist (the non-mentioned God-statements on the Jefferson Memorial to the contrary notwithstanding), why studying religion to understand literary references is ok, and why parents indoctrinating their children with religious beliefs should be viewed as child abuse. (The depth of Dawkins’ political thought is shown by his failure to ponder for one second the implica­tions of a government that can tell parents what beliefs they can and cannot transmit to their offspring.)

Far from being a serious philosophical book, this ill-edited and garrulous diatribe contains just about anything that crosses the author’s mind—including numerous quotes from that popular author, atheist, and graduate student, Sam Harris. What one won’t find in The God Delusion is serious curiosity about the essential nature of the universe. The billions upon billions of stars and galaxies that Carl Sagan invoked with semi-mystical awe, become, for Dawkins, a mere premise for his theoretical conceit that random interactions could have produced the phenomenon of life on earth. (With so many planets, it had to have happened somewhere!) Never mind the fact that scientists endowed with that mysterious chemical characteristic known as consciousness can’t, with purposeful intent, replicate that vital accident. And never mind that scientists like DNA-theorist Francis Crick were so baffled by the complexity of early life forms that they toyed with a panspermia hypothesis according to which space aliens brought life-seeds to earth. And finally, never mind the embarrassing fossil-record confession by the late Harvard biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, that “most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth” and that in any local area, “a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed.’”

Dawkins’ treatment of that mathematical genius and 17^th century philosopher, Blaise Pascal, is typical of his general approach. Dawkins seizes on Pascal’s weakest argument, the wager, and ridicules its obvious flaws. Ignored are the well-known passages that ground Pascal’s (oft-wavering) faith in the inadequacy of the human mind to deal with the enormity of the universe—both the infinitely large and the infinitely small. In Pascal’s words, “The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short, it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God that imagination loses itself in that thought.”

Had Dawkins bothered to cite this assertion, he would doubtless have countered it with replies that recur throughout his book. First, the awe that Pascal discusses has nothing to do with religion. Rather, it’s the kind of atheistic wonder that’s typical in scientists like Einstein. Second, this “God of the gaps” argument simply fills in the blanks of our ignorance with a destructive, curiosity-impeding concept. Third—and this is Dawkins’ favorite argument—the complexity of a God who created the world requires explanation. Put simply: Who made God?

Worshipful humility in the face of mind-boggling (possibly parallel) universes is an emotion foreign to Dawkins—though the academic pugilist does admit to feeling very lucky. As for the “Who made God?” argument, this retort (convincing to any skeptical freshman who hasn’t read Aristotle or Kant) ignores the fact that philosophical explanations, as Wittgenstein and others have noted, have to end somewhere. The real question is whether one’s explanation terminates with a meaningless cosmos or with a being who provides a reason for things. Dawkins, without further ado, assumes that the former alternative is the only rational choice. In this way he gives tacit expression to the point of view that Whitehead criticized some 80 years ago:

“There persists…throughout the whole [modern] period the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. It itself, such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism.’ Also, it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived.”

Whitehead continues, displaying the non-tendentiousness to which I previously referred, “It [scientific materialism] is not wrong, if properly construed. If we confine ourselves to certain types of facts, abstracted from the complete circumstances in which they occur, the materialistic assumption expresses these facts to perfection. But when we pass beyond the abstraction, either by more subtle employment of our senses, or by the request for meanings and for coherence of thoughts, the scheme breaks down at once.”

In other words, once we look for a rational ground for complex development, self-consciousness, aesthetics, morality, and the universe itself, Dawkins’ brute facts (which in the world of quantum physics are neither brutish nor facts) look extremely lame. This lameness, I should add, comports nicely with the pleasure-based ethical system to which Dawkins appeals with no particular rigor.

Overall, Dawkins’ “philosophy” amounts to little more than this unintentionally humorous observation by Dr. Edward Tryon that was quoted in a Time-Life book on cosmology, “Our universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time.” That’s reason according to Dawkins—a man whose cultural and philosophical observations are predictably au currant, consistently dogmatic, and largely unreflective. He is the un-Whitehead, a man who will never (barring divine intervention) appreciate this sublime comment by my philosophical mentor: “In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.”

Review by Richard Kirk

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer who lives in Oceanside, CA. He is a regular columnist for San Diego’s North County Times and has been published in several other Southern California newspapers. His reviews have appeared in The American Enterprise, First Things, Touchstone, The American Spectator Online, and the California Republic website. See his blog, Richard Kirk on Ethics: Musing With A Hammer.

37% of all children born in the United States are “illegitimate.” I use the now-banished term to emphasize the coincidence of our kinder, gentler linguistic habits and the devastating increase in “out-of-wedlock” births.

In 2005, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, more than 1.5 million of the 4.1 million births in this country were to unmarried women—most in their 20s. Fifty years ago, when “illegitimacy” still existed as a social stigma, the number of children born without the benefit of married parents was about 5%. Apparently the progressive policy of social sensitivity hasn’t been a boon to those children for whom it was supposedly instituted.

Despite the rationalizations of 60s and 70s sociologists, it eventually became clear that what ails most children with one parent isn’t a social stigma, but rather the fact that they have only one parent—usually a mom. Unfortunately, our post-Murphy Brown society now casually accepts even the actions of terminally selfish women who deliberately deprive their children of a father—just as it casually ignores the consequences.

One study found that 90% of the rise in violent crime between 1973 and 1995 could be related to out-of-wedlock births. Another found that cohabitation is 10 times more prevalent now than in 1980, and that kids in these homes are twice as likely to see mom and dad split up than children whose parents have that “meaningless scrap of paper”—a marriage certificate. Indeed, fewer than half of cohabiting couples stay together more than five years—the typical duration being 18 months. Most depressingly, kids in these “test drive families” are vastly more likely to be abused.

As these statistics show, the destigmatizing of America has coincided with the demoralization of America. Indeed, one has to tune in Dr. Laura to get a taste of the phrases most folks would have employed fifty years ago—“shack-up honey,” “unpaid w*ore,” and “do it for the kids.” (The last statement is perhaps the one that’s most despised today.)

It isn’t unusual for irresponsibility and selfishness to parade around in respectable linguistic garments. I’m confident that most of the desire to destigmatize illegitimacy arose not from a deep concern for the welfare of children but rather from an unstated desire to normalize promiscuity. The latter goal was quickly accomplished by substituting the term “sexually active” for the p-word and by illustrating, ad nauseam, the pain-free joys of extramarital sex on the boob tube.

No more does our tolerant culture make individuals feel bad about doing bad things. We’re more “mature” than our judgmental grandparents. Ignored is the other side of the equation—including the millions of kids whose egg- and sperm-donors mostly take parenthood less seriously than driving an automobile. The latter activity, at least, requires a license.

See my review of Mark Steyn's AMERICA ALONE (The Bon Vivant and the Falling Camel)

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer who lives in Oceanside, CA. He is a regular columnist for San Diego’s North County Times and has been published in several other Southern California newspapers. His reviews have been published in The American Enterprise, First Things, Touchstone, The American Spectator Online, and the California Republic website. See his blog, Richard Kirk on Ethics: Musing With A Hammer.

America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It by Mark Steyn.

Two things set Mark Steyn apart from dystopian naysayers like Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore. First, Steyn is an irrepressible bon vivant—an odd trait in a journalist touting “the end of the world as we know it.” Linguistically, no turn of phrase is too banal, risqué, or obscure to be included in Steyn’s repertoire of fin de siecle ripostes. If Western civilization is going down the tubes, Steyn will at least get in a few bon vins, bonbons, and bon mots before the Eiffel Tower becomes the world’s most prominent minaret.

Second, Steyn has a drawer-full of hard data at his disposal—not cherry-picked computer models whose calculations are amazingly dependent on the speculative formulas fed into them. On an LP sold contemporaneously with Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, the late comedian Don Adams mimics an incompetent defense attorney who protests how easy it is for the prosecutor to accuse his client of murder. After all, “He’s got proof. All I have are trickery and deceit.” Ehrlich and Gore may have imaginary numbers up their sleeves, but like the comic’s legal adversary, Steyn has a briefcase of persuasive exhibits: moribund European birth rates, unsustainable social welfare systems, growing Muslim immigration, high Muslim birth rates, the murder of Theo van Gogh, deadly bombings in London and Madrid, the nightly torching of Renaults and Citroens by French “youths,” craven acts of multi-culti cowardice in the face of sharia demands, and a future-be-damned philosophy that coincides perfectly with plunging birth rates.

For Europe, Steyn notes, this is “The Gelded Age”—with Spanish women reproducing at a rate that will halve the nation’s population in a generation or so. Almost as dire, demographically, is the 1.3 births per woman ratio that prevails in Greece—a figure that belies the image of fecundity in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Indeed, it seems that uptight red-state Protestants are doing a better job of being fruitful than Italians who, if current trends continue, will live in a nation where 60 percent of them “have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, [and] no uncles.” Dinner tables filled with pasta and relatives will be replaced by pizza for one.

This population bust spells disaster for Ponzi-shaped welfare schemes that depend on young bodies to support generational transfers to oldsters who neglected the primary task of regeneration. Greece’s pension liabilities, for example, are projected to reach 25% of GDP by 2040. More immigration from people-rich Muslim nations is the clear “solution” to this demographic vacuum—a solution that’s already altered the habits of women in Amsterdam and London who “cover up” to avoid jeers in increasingly Muslim neighborhoods. Such examples show how, in Western Europe, assimilation has come to mean (as Kofi Annan implied when commenting on the Danish cartoon violence) a nation adjusting its ways to accommodate new arrivals.

Steyn’s term, “Eurabia,” suggests the future he foresees for a continent flirting with a “demographic death spiral” and brooding in the lounge of that “old ennui.” Rotterdam, where the Muslim population is 40%, may presage the shape of things by 2050—or sooner if emigration out of “Eutopia” accelerates. In such an environment, “Pre-modern Islam beats post-modern Christianity.” Put more dramatically, it’s unlikely that “Pornistan” will peacefully co-exist with “the Islamic Republic of Holland.” And in the struggle between those two, the strong horse doesn’t belong to those who take pride in the fact that they aren’t prepared to die for anything.

To fend off charges of Islamophobia, Steyn issues periodic caveats that acknowledge what “of course” everyone knows—that most Muslims aren’t Wahhabists, that many have assimilated to Western ways, and that not every baby named Mohammad (the most popular boy’s name in Belgium) is destined to strap explosives to his chest and blow up a Brussels bus. Still, the author makes a convincing case that neither demographics nor cultural clout favor the continued existence of Europe as we know it. In the meantime, Western women in the EU are producing an average of 1.4 children while the Muslim EU rate is 3.5. At least one North African tyrant is on record predicting that the “Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.” The official number of Muslims now living in Europe is 20 million. Colonel Gaddafi’s figure is 50 million. If Muammar isn’t right today, he soon will be.

Unlike native Europeans, the birth rate in the United States is still at replacement level, 2.1—1.85 among whites. And while the nation has its immigration woes, those problems don’t involve large percentages of Muslims or the gradual introduction of sharia. Still, many Europhiles find the continent’s dance-macabre enchanting. And, like elites on the other side of the pond, these blue-state sophisticates despise their “self-righteous, gun-totin’, military-lovin’, sister-marryin’, abortion-hatin’, gay-loathin’, non-passport ownin’” redneck cousins. Steyn observes, however, that these pejoratives can be translated more positively as “culturally confident, self-reliant, patriotic, procreative, [and] religious.” Judging from census figures, such traits are also more productive of a viable culture than the infantilizing statism to which Europeans have become addicted. “Over there” servile selfishness has spawned a continent of non-spawners.

Unfortunately, Steyn laments, the United States hasn’t exported self-reliance and limited government half as well as Terminator movies and Madonna concerts. If it had, some viable national partners would be standing alongside it. Instead, America subsidized social irresponsibility after World War II by taking upon itself more than the lion’s share of Western Europe’s defense. Simultaneously, America lessened its political influence by puffing up international institutions like the United Nations. This diplomatic courtesy didn’t win America the support of nations to whom it graciously ceded bits and chunks of power. It’s now time, Steyn avers, for the U.S. to speak with a voice commensurate with its strength and to tout its best cultural ideals. If it doesn’t, the only thing the rest of the world will associate with America will be cheeseburgers, tawdry films, and weak knees.

Steyn also devotes attention to two other major nations, Japan and Russia. The former is entering a period of population decline but doesn’t face the identity crisis that arises with mass immigration. Russia, by contrast, appears to be a basket case—with a per woman birth rate of 1.2, a male life span of 59 years, and an abortion rate of 70%. That’s a demographic trifecta whose winners will be the new Islamic countries on Russia’s southern border and (in the Siberian East) China. While China has its own demographic challenges, with 19% more boys than girls, that nation still numbers well over a billion and might provide a pool of frustrated males to rectify the Y-chromosome dearth in (what is now) Russia. The bottom line for Russia is this: “the world’s largest country is dying, and the question is how violent its death throes will be.”

The title of Steyn’s final chapter, The Falling Camel, refers to the weakness that, in an Arab proverb, “attracts many knives.” This maxim is cited to deplore the multicultural rituals regularly performed by Western leaders after terrorist attacks. Instead of these craven antics, what is needed in our civilizational war is “more will.” And the key to victory in that struggle is reforming Islam. This objective, Steyn concedes, is ultimately up to Muslims. America can, however, facilitate change by supporting free Islamic societies, by transforming the energy industry and defunding oil dictatorships, by ending the Iranian regime, and by “strik[ing] militarily when the opportunity presents itself.”

At least two things are unclear about this multi-pronged strategy. First, where will the resolve come from to accomplish these daunting tasks? Second, why should growing, confident Muslim cultures alter their ways based on advice, threats, and bombs from foreigners who aren’t even keen on reproduction? With respect to American fortitude, the most plausible motivator that Steyn notes involves falling European camels. If the knives that appear during their descent don’t open eyes and stiffen backbones, nothing will.

So much for Mr. Bon Vivant.

Review by Richard Kirk

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer who lives in Oceanside, CA. He is a regular columnist for San Diego’s North County Times and has been published in several other Southern California newspapers. His reviews have been published in The American Enterprise, First Things, Touchstone, The American Spectator Online, and the California Republic website. See his blog, Richard Kirk on Ethics: Musing With A Hammer.

Pat Buchanan’s popular book, State of Emergency, is more than a litany of eye-popping anecdotes and statistics about the economic, demographic, and social impact of legal and illegal immigration. Buchanan does, of course, provide abundant information about these matters—how a tidal wave of unskilled labor has depressed working class wages, how the same migration of souls has altered the ethnic makeup of California and Texas, and how this influx has affected the safety of Americans victimized by aliens who now make up “over 29% of prisoners in Federal Bureau of Prison facilities.” Buchanan also tells readers that at least 300,000  “anchor babies” are born in the U.S. each year, that 54% of Los Angeles County’s 9 million inhabitants speak languages other than English at home, and that almost as many immigrants are in the U.S. today (36 million) as came to America between 1607 and 1965. Throw in data about the return of once-conquered diseases like tuberculosis, the nationwide growth of vicious gangs like Mara Salvatrucha, and the stark educational deficits exhibited by recent adult immigrants (31% of whom never finished high school) and you have what one might expect from a book with the aforementioned title.  
 

At its core, however, Buchanan’s book is a work of political philosophy whose central question is posed in chapter nine: “What is a Nation?” According to the author, this vital inquiry has three possible answers. The first is that a nation consists of a common set of economic relationships. This view is dispatched with the remark by French historian Ernest Renan: “A Zollverein is not a fatherland.” The institutional status of today’s European Union reinforces Renan’s remark, and Buchanan drives home the point with this poignant observation: “For two centuries, men have died for America. Who would lay down his life for the UN, the EU, or a ‘North American Union’?”
 
A more popular “neoconservative” answer to Buchanan’s patriotic query is that the United States is a unique country whose roots are essentially creedal. By this reasoning, America is a nation composed of individuals, regardless of national origin or ethnicity, who subscribe to ideas elaborated in America’s founding documents. While Buchanan doesn’t deny that these ideas are part of what it means to be an American, he insists that national identity involves something more—something that can be recognized and felt apart from political convictions.
 
This “something more” concerns ethnicity, history, and tradition. Americans, Buchanan observes, created the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—not vice versa.  He also notes, uncomfortably for those educated in multicultural classrooms, that the colonists who composed those documents were overwhelmingly “brethren” from the British Isles. Democracy and the rule of law weren’t abstract concepts that grew on American soil like wind-blown seeds felicitously falling on good earth. They were traditions carried by English settlers who populated the territories that later became the United States of America. National roots, Buchanan insists, come attached to the historical soil in which they grew. They aren’t nakedly exposed tendrils floating in some international hydroponic solution.
 
American leaders from Washington and Hamilton to Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson recognized this fact about national identity. The former wished to avoid large concentrations of foreigners, just as T.R. and Wilson denounced “hyphenated-Americanism” and divided loyalties. It wasn’t xenophobia that prompted these statements but rather the realization that nations rest on a shared background of culture, history, literature, and language—indeed, of shared ancestors. As even Patrick Moynihan observed, the nation is the largest group to which individuals see themselves ancestrally related. Negative illustrations of this truth are abundant in recent history: the violent rupture of the faux-nation of Yugoslavia, the splintering of the Soviet Union into more than a dozen nations with distinct ethnic roots, the divorce between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the ethnic and religious wars that plague Rwanda, Sudan, and a host of African “nations.”
 
One of Buchanan’s most poignant arguments involves this “reverse scenario” thought experiment: “How many Americans, forced to work in Mexico, would become loyal Mexicans in a decade rather than remain Americans in exile? Why do we think that Mexicans are any less attached to the land of their birth?” It is a jarring question, especially when one realizes that “one in six [Mexicans] is already here” and that “Nearly 90 percent of all immigrants now come from continents and countries whose peoples have never been assimilated fully into any Western country…”
 
But what about the notion that we are “a nation of immigrants” and that what happened in the past will surely happen again? Buchanan uses a drawer-full of statistics and the testimony of various American leaders to show that 1) the United States was always, overwhelmingly, an English-speaking country culturally tied to the mother country, 2) immigration into the United States prior to 1965 was overwhelmingly from Europe, and 3) immigration in the past pales when compared with the influx in the last few decades. To emphasize this final point, Buchanan recurs to the debate that surrounded the 1965 Immigration Act, where the most liberal position advocated raising annual quotas from 156,700 to 250,000.  Today, “between one and two million” immigrants,  “legal and illegal,” come to the United States every year.   
 
Moreover, strong political and cultural forces now discourage the assimilation of those coming from Latin American: dual citizenship, multiculturalism, the explosive growth of Spanish broadcasting in the U.S., Mexico’s desire to politically and economically exploit the loyalty of its émigrés, and the very real belief in “Reconquista.” All these factors, in addition to sheer numbers, undermine an assimilation process that transformed 40 million Europeans into Americans over a span of 350 years.
 
Throughout his book Buchanan asserts that patriotism, “love of country,” is the soul that animates a nation—a love rooted in common language, common ancestors, common stories, common religious faith, and common experiences. All these ties, however, are now under assault—from within by cultural critics who laud diversity and relish America-bashing—from without by immigrants bound by language, culture, and history to their own native lands. The prospect for America can already be seen in “Eurabia,” where governments struggle to find some social equilibrium between ethnic groups with radically different backgrounds and sensibilities. Ultimately, as Buchanan warns in his book’s first pages, what happened to Imperial Rome at the hands of unassimilated Germanic tribes will be the fate of the United States—unless Americans summon the will to reverse policies that their leaders have foisted upon them.
 
The depredations associated with open borders are realities felt most by patriotic working stiffs, not by diversity-minded globalists who seek to maximize economic efficiencies and minimize the appeal of all things parochial. The bonds between cosmopolitans and their native lands are tenuous at best—and at worse, adversarial. For jet-set egotists, cultures are like sampler tables at an international exhibition. None can demand their exclusive loyalty. To them Robert E. Lee’s fateful choice of Virginia over the Union is incomprehensible and perverse.
 
Beyond the political, economic, and ideological forces that contribute to America’s paralysis in the face of demographic dissolution, there is, I think, another factor that Buchanan doesn’t discuss. That factor is related to the elitist-populist divide and concerns the nation’s self-image. Put simply, if a country doesn’t believe in itself, it won’t bother to defend itself. And America, as shaped and envisioned by elites, isn’t a culture worth defending—a country devoid of religious devotion, a country stripped of heroes, a country populated by consumers who take for granted the sexualization of children and the dissolution of marriage, a country molded not by traditions and loyalties that spring from heart and hearth but by the capricious winds of intellectual fashion and the corrupt imaginations of television producers. If “love of country” is the nation’s soul, as Buchanan avers, it follows that the nation’s body must also be thought worthy of salvaging. Yet what possible reason would there be to make strenuous exertions on behalf the post-modern golem described above?
 
Buchanan’s book, however, is gloomy enough as it is—all the more so because his vision of national identity rings true on many levels. The only question is whether the culturally and historically rooted nation he honors is too far gone for the prescribed medicine: no amnesty, no “chain migration” or “anchor babies,” no dual citizenship, no welfare magnets, an immigration moratorium, a border fence, and deportation of illegals. It’s a pill that’s sure to stick in the throat of political leaders whose hearts are tied, more than anything else, to the patricidal approbation of elite opinion.  
 
 
Review by Richard Kirk
 
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer who lives in Oceanside, California. He is a regular columnist for San Diego’s North County Times. See his blog, Richard Kirk on Ethics: Musing With A Hammer. <http://musingwithahammerkirk.blogspot.com/> 
 
 

In his 1993 article, “Defining Deviancy Down,” Patrick Moynihan mentioned a New York Times headline that proclaimed the school year’s “first” shooting. Moynihan added sardonically, “first of the season.”

So far this season, as ABC News informs us, “there have been 25 shootings at or near schools nationwide. Several of the shootings—three in the last week—have been fatal.” This last comment rather understates the execution killing of at least five little Amish girls in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Multiple killings bring out media analysts in a way that quotidian school murders do not. (A seemingly endless list of violent incidents, including “unsuccessful” attempts, can be accessed at schoolsecurity.org.) The “reason” for these killings is generally sought in some specific cause—a twenty year grudge, copycat motives, the availability of guns, the absence of armed guards, Ritalin, video games, bullying, cliques. By focusing on the little picture, which is not a totally useless enterprise, we lose sight of the larger picture—perhaps intentionally.

Karl Marx did not, I think, get everything wrong. One of the common statements made by Marxist scholars goes as follows: “Only the whole is true, and the whole is false.” The comment means that one has to look at the big picture, and that the big picture, presently, is deceptive and rotten.

The big picture in our society includes rotten video games, guns, and Ritalin—but it also includes an obsessive fascination with death presented as entertainment on the CSI family of shows. Here corpses in various stages of decomposition are featured on every show for our viewing pleasure—juxtaposed inevitably with tantalizing shots of nubile bodies that appeal to another basic instinct. Episodes compete with one another to explore new depths of perversity—like raping and killing children.

The big picture includes, likewise, a phalanx of individuals who all insist on the right to do what they want—demanding that others consider their wishes while giving scant attention to matters of reciprocity or to the word “responsibility.”

The big picture includes a society where padded-bra kids are sexualized for profit and where free speech, a la Howard Stern, has devolved into a race for the bottom.

The big picture involves the unprecedented ceding of cultural power to morally vacuous individuals who pollute souls for a living. These electronic traveling salesmen, from Abercrombie and Fitch to Madonna to David Letterman, influence children, collectively, as much or more than parents.

Ponder the TV show Two and a Half Men. Attend to the loud and angry sounds that blare from the hot wheels of young males. Note the sophisticated psychobabble that avoids the terms “good” and “evil.” That is the ugly whole. That is a world where, in the words of Flannery O’Connor’s reflective Misfit, there’s “No pleasure but meanness.”

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer published regularly by (San Diego's) North County Times. Other posts: http://musingwithahammerkirk.blogspot.com

“She would have been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

The line occurs near the end of Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” It refers to a self-absorbed grandmother who had just been murdered (along with her son and his family) by a religiously reflective killer. Sadly, the poignant observation seems to fit many Americans’ relationship to the events of 9/11/2001.

For some weeks following that infamous date, Americans focused intently on things that matter: courage, honor, integrity, especially patriotism. An inconceivable tragedy highlighted the tenuous nature of the blessings we take for granted--family, peace, freedom--and temporarily diverted attention from the superficial, vile, or self-serving activities which preoccupy so many of us.

During that time firemen and cops replaced movie stars and pop divas as society’s most admired individuals. Anonymous heroes without Malibu mansions or drug rap sheets were honored instead of their celluloid counterparts. People were jolted into asking serious questions: “What is really important? What is worth dying for? Why am I here?”

As months wore on, however, it became obvious that many individuals-- especially the rich and famous camera cult--were eager to reinstitute the old regime. Where, after all, would MTV be if youngsters began to idolize Todd Beamer instead of Eminem or Madonna? Where would Hollywood’s hedonism rank in a world where integrity was defined by virtue and self-sacrifice instead of doing whatever the heck you please? And how could Leno and Letterman deliver nightly monologues for audiences that weren’t tawdry and cynical?

Where would the talk-show Lilliputians be in a world where national leaders aren’t caricatured as blithering idiots who deserve nothing but contempt? And what would happen to that cohort of intellectuals whose sense of moral superiority rests solely on acts of vicious criticism--folks physically revolted by exhibitions of patriotism and profoundly depressed at the prospect of restraining their venom another day?

A world where personal virtue is taken seriously isn’t to the liking of these groups. Like the children of Israel in the book of Exodus, they long to return to the “fleshpots of Egypt”--to revel in the thoughtless security of a society where matters of life and death are reduced to vulgar punch lines in yet another South Park episode.

They wish to “get on with their lives”--to forget the truths of death, heroism, and evil and to slide back into a world of cheap sex, cheap talk, and cheap rebellion. They crave a life of comfortable celebrity devoid of nobility and moral earnestness.

As the memory of 9/11 fades, “American Idol” replaces the World Trade Center on pop-culture’s jumbotron. Too many Americans, it seems, need to be shot every day to avoid reverting to lives of brutish pettiness.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer published regularly by (San Diego's) North County Times. Other posts: http://musingwithahammerkirk.blogspot.com

What a culture embraces most deeply is seldom articulated. It is, rather, presupposed. Today’s secular media culture is given expression via thousands of messages every hour —in film, television, CDs, magazines, and iPod presentations—but its philosophical roots are largely invisible.

Freedom is certainly a basic dogma of the media culture, as it was of the Judeo-Christian culture that preceded it. But the purpose of post-modern freedom is largely undefined. Today the idea that individuals can do “whatever they want” is reiterated ad nauseam. The notion that people “should” do certain things, except for recycling, is given short shrift. Even the much-touted virtue of tolerance, when scrutinized, turns out to be a non-negotiable demand that non-secular folks abandon restrictive beliefs about right and wrong.

This purposeless freedom, freedom for its own sake, is a concept that feeds into the popular notion of “pushing the envelope.” Those who employ this phrase typically do so with the tacit assumption that destroying taboos is a progressive enterprise—an activity that puts taboo-breakers on a higher plane than individuals who dwell in the passé world of “thou shalt nots.” Accordingly, bi-coastals view cultures that take blasphemy seriously as primitive and theocratic.

What one expects to gain by normalizing depravity, exhibited most completely in gangsta rap, isn’t articulated beyond vacuous clichés like “openness” and “artistic freedom.” A vague romantic hope persists that, with the aid of science and midnight basketball, utopian bliss will break out once nine-year-olds can swear proficiently and are no longer naïve about varieties of sexual expression once labeled “perversions.”

The apotheosis of individual freedom also requires the abolition of concepts like natural law. There are, it seems, no self-evident truths. Even distinctions between male and female are treated as arbitrary constructs. Just as individuals can be whatever they want to be, so families and marriages can be constituted in ways limited only by our capacity to imagine them.

Tepid and unimaginative formulations—“My freedom to swing my fist ends at your nose.”—limit the possibilities of self-expression under this cultural myth that presupposes a godless universe devoid of freedom.

Youngsters raised within this cultural framework are told to view nature as a meaningless fluke that must be revered and preserved. They are told to view their existence as accidental and their desires as rights. They are told (dozens of times every day) that religion is a childish delusion rooted in wish fulfillment. And they are assured that predatory corporate magnates must be allowed to corrupt the souls of children for the sake of “freedom.”

Is it any wonder that many young adults, especially those with links to non-Western culture, find an intransigent religious sect that boldly preaches the exact opposite more nourishing—and even more reasonable?

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer published regularly by (San Diego's) North County Times. Other posts: http://musingwithahammerkirk.blogspot.com

In 1950 a book came out sporting this provocative title: “Science is a Sacred Cow.” That reverential attitude is still reflected in most reportage today. Witness CNN’s “News from Science and Medicine.” Discouraging words here are about as frequent as tropical storms in San Diego. Every wonder-filled syllable fosters the impression that truth reigns supreme in this discipline where the foibles of human nature have been, for all practical purposes, overcome.

Enter Richard Lindzen, a professor of atmospheric science at MIT. A few months ago Lindzen composed an article for the Wall Street Journal that put another face on the work of his colleagues—a very human face.

Specifically, Lindzen pointed to institutional forces that work to silence dissenting voices in the global warming debate. Editors of professional journals, he charged, regularly discouraged papers that did not reflect what was becoming the “party line” on the topic. Moreover, articles that took a contrary position on the topic were quickly “discredited” without providing time for reasonable dialogue. Persons once considered authorities were suddenly ignored or even vilified.

The reason for this rush toward consensus, in Lindzen’s view, is simple. Ideas that promote a crisis mentality generate greater publicity and funding, just as ideas that undercut this mentality threaten to separate researchers from their precious cash cows.

Lindzen notes that federal climate research dollars have grown from “a few hundred million dollars” before 1990 “to $1.7 billion today.” That’s 1.7 billion reasons to join the bandwagon. And one can be sure that those incentives will grow as more studies come up with the “proper” results.

The notion that scientific communities are somehow above the social and psychological dynamics that function in every other area of human activity is an illusion rooted in ignorance and wishful thinking. Viewed in historical perspective, science regularly exhibits the philosophical excesses of its era. The works of German and American eugenicists, circa 1920, are instructive.

Furthermore, just a little historical knowledge is all that would be needed to dispense with the ridiculous phrase “we now know” that regularly introduces reports that contradict studies heralded with identical linguistic confidence ten years earlier.

What most people don’t know is that “absolute proof” is next to impossible in an enterprise where “models” or “paradigms” figure prominently in the investigative mix--determining from the outset numerous conceptual and procedural matters. Accordingly, the philosopher Karl Popper emphasized the “falsifiability” of scientific assertions (as opposed to “proof”) and stressed the importance of maintaining an open society where questions are encouraged.

The tentativeness of scientific assertions and the humanity of scientists are two facts that are inconvenient for Al Gore—a politician whose zeal to shut down scientific debate betokens not a passion for truth but rather a lust for power.

Orlando Patterson recently dropped an ideological stink bomb on his chums at the New York Times. In an article published March 26, the Harvard sociologist notes not only the “disconnect” that exists between “millions of black youths” and “the American mainstream,” but also “the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem.”

This failure, according to Patterson, has been caused by “a deep-seated dogma that has prevailed in social science and policy circles since the mid-1960’s.” That dogma rejected “any explanation that invokes a group’s cultural attributes” and focused instead on “structural factors like low incomes, joblessness, poor schools and bad housing.”

Translating socio-speak into plain English, Patterson is saying that his professional colleagues have been unwilling to admit that a corrupt subculture has had a devastating impact on millions of young black males. Instead, academics have put all their analytical eggs in economic baskets that exclude the domain of morality.

To the chagrin of ivory tower Marxists, Patterson observes that “countless studies… have found that poor schools, per se, do not explain why after 10 years of education a young man remains illiterate.” Nor do they explain why young black females do so much better than their male counterparts.

What does explain this phenomenon is the group approval given to young males who assert their manhood by shunning literacy, assuming a “cool-pose” persona, and engaging in acts of two-bit bravado. For Patterson "hip-hop music and culture" functioned "almost like a drug," that led them to scorn academics in favor of sharp clothes, narcotics, and erotic conquests. 

Despite these insights, Patterson isn’t yet prepared to jump professional ship and devotes much of his time taking back with the left hand what the right hand had given. Thomas Sowell, a scholar not subject to the blacklisting pressure that permeates most campuses, fingers more forthrightly the “r*dn*ck” culture that is ruining the lives of many young blacks—a culture whose roots run back to the very non-black borderland between England and Scotland.

If Patterson and his cohorts had the courage of a Bill Cosby, their analyses wouldn’t tiptoe around an issue that is obvious to anyone with a modicum of sense and the courage to report what should be obvious to anyone: Subcultures that glorify violence, indolence, and promiscuity affect youngsters every bit as much as vicious racist stereotypes or economic hardship.

The problem with most sociologists isn’t a paucity of data but a lack of backbone. They are loath to criticize play'rs in the music and entertainment industry lest they offend powerful forces whose power grows in tandem with black degradation.

Senator Daniel Moynihan once remarked, regretfully, that there’s good money to be made in bad schools. The same sociological insight applies to a corrupt subculture.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer who lives in Oceanside. His columns appear regularly in San Diego’s North County Times. Blog: http://musingwithahammer.townhall.com

In recent decades the phrase “cycle of violence” has become popular among academics and politically active celebrities. These words are typically employed when speaking about groups that blow up wedding parties and behead civilian hostages. By contrast, in these same intellectual circles the term “evil” is reserved for corporate executives and Presidents of the wrong political party—that is, for verbal targets who don’t fire back with live ammunition.

The phrase “cycle of violence” has several advantages. First, it transforms discrete acts of murder, retribution, or self-defense into an impersonal pattern. Rather than talking about particular persons who are guilty of specific crimes, this popular phrase encourages us to focus on a revolving door of mayhem in which hapless victims have been “caught up.”

(In similar fashion, individuals who promote cultural depravity are hidden behind “pendulum swings” that invisibly move public taste from the pole labeled Bing Crosby and “Leave It To Beaver” to one named “Two and a Half Men” and Eminem.)

The phrase “cycle of violence” thus excludes from one’s imagination the idea that certain groups and individuals might have greater responsibility than others for initiating or exacerbating hostilities. Messy details about what groups believe and how they talk about their opponents are shunted to the side.

Moreover, the proper solution to a “cycle of violence” is simple. Just intervene at any point in the flow of events to break the historical momentum. According to this paradigm, a tranquil equilibrium will automatically emerge once “the cycle” has been stopped. By picturing circumstances in this way one achieves a certain moral equivalence. Names disappear as attention is focused on a malevolent maelstrom that transcends human responsibility.

Several years ago a similar point of view was employed (in similar circles) when the arms race between America and the Soviet Union was discussed. If the U.S. unilaterally froze its weapon production, then the “cycle” would be broken and harmony would emerge. A more infantile version of this idea was promoted under the Sleep-In for Peace label.

In short, “cycle of violence” language excuses us from the task of distinguishing between force used to counter evil and violence employed to propagate evil. Indeed, it mindlessly places the actions of law enforcement officers and gang members in the same category. Most of all, this phrase makes it unnecessary to resist evil or even to take it seriously.

Almost half a century ago Hannah Arendt, speaking of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, observed that sophisticated opinion wished only to condemn trends “so general that distinctions [could] no longer be made.” I imagine that she would find today’s “cycle of violence” crowd (a group that includes “Munich” producer Steven Spielberg) as morally confused as the intellectuals she took to task.

Slogging through The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America is a bit like taking in the Interstate scenery between Abilene and El Paso—a whole lot of the same thing. Orchestrated by David Horowitz and largely carried out by an ensemble of assistants, this book consists, in large measure, of a succession of ideological portraits culled from campuses across the country. Profiles of anti-American Marxists who employ classrooms to advance their radical social agenda are interrupted by profiles of anti-American gay theorists, anti-Semitic Islamists, and anti-Caucasian racists who all exhibit contempt for ideas other than their own. Amid the mind-numbing repetitiveness of this serial critique of academic bigotry and incompetence, a few cases do stand out.

Take, for example, Bernardine Dohrn and her husband Bill Ayers. Dohrn is a law professor at Northwestern, while Ayers holds the title “Distinguished Professor” at the University of Illinois, Chicago. In their youth both joined the Weatherman underground, a group that “managed to bomb the U.S. Capitol building, New York City Police Headquarters, the Pentagon, and the National Guard offices in Washington, D.C.”

Far from being on the periphery of this organization, Dohrn and Ayers were active members. Indeed, both were pursued by the FBI throughout the 70s. According to a Horowitz researcher, only a “technicality” for improper surveillance prevented the pair from receiving serious jail time for their crimes. Moreover, neither professor has denounced the activities they supported years ago.

Of his bomb-detonating days Ayers commented, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” That comment, ironically enough, was published by the New York Times in the edition that was delivered to the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Dohrn, by contrast, claimed to be “joking” when she celebrated the brutal Sharon Tate murders that were carried out by members of Charles Manson’s clan: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” This same person now directs the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern and spends her professional time, along with her husband, working to prevent the punishment of violent juvenile offenders.

Then there is the inventor of Kwanzaa, Professor Ron Karenga. In 1971, Karenga and two other members of his “United Slaves” organization were convicted of felonious assault and false imprisonment. Karenga, who bestowed the title “Maulana” or “Master Teacher” upon himself, spent four years in prison for these crimes before being released in 1975. This resume blemish didn’t prevent Karenga from securing a faculty appointment at San Diego State University shortly thereafter. In 1979 Karenga moved to Cal State Long Beach where, in 1989, he was named head of the Black Studies Department. That’s an amazing career track--fourteen years from prison inmate to department head of a state university!

(Meshing nicely with this case of affirmative action for criminals, researcher Thomas Ryan notes that Kwanzaa’s seven principles are the same principles embraced by the Symbionese Liberation Army—the domestic terrorist group that kidnapped Patricia Hearst in 1974 and employed a seven-headed snake to symbolize their collectivist philosophy.)

Having run for vice-president on the party’s ticket in 1980 and ’84, Angela Davis is probably the most famous Communist now teaching on American campuses. But she is surely the only “University Professor” in the University of California system who boasts that title despite a complete absence of serious scholarship. Davis does, of course, possess the distinction of fleeing from the FBI and being tried for involvement in a 1970 plot to free her imprisoned lover—a Black Panther awaiting trial for murder. This plot resulted in the death of four people, including Judge Harold Haley, whose “head was blown off by a sawed-off shotgun owned by Professor Davis.” Davis, however, acting as her own lawyer to avoid cross-examination, was found not guilty of the conspiracy charges against her—thus setting the stage for the honors that were lavished upon her by both the Soviet Union (the International Lenin Peace Prize) and the University of California system.

Horowitz’s well-written introductory chapter contains the most egregious example of academic preferences for imprisoned radicals. That case concerns Susan Rosenberg, who, in the fall of 2004, was invited to join the faculty of Hamilton College as a “Visiting Professor.” Twenty years earlier Rosenberg, another member of the Weatherman underground, had been apprehended and sentenced to 58 years in prison for helping move hundreds of pounds of explosives into a New Jersey warehouse. A midnight pardon issued by Bill Clinton, however, made all the difference between doing time in a federal prison and teaching a course on “Resistance Memoirs” to students at Hamilton.

Rosenberg’s invitation to Hamilton was only withdrawn when a student, Ian Mandel, brought intense public scrutiny to her background—a history that also included an indictment for the murder of two Nyack, New Jersey police officers whose memorial stood a mile from Mandel’s home. As if to indicate their contempt for public standards of decency, the Hamilton organization responsible for inviting a convicted terrorist to the faculty followed that fiasco with a speaking invitation to Ward Churchill—an offer that was reluctantly rescinded after Churchill’s “little Eichmanns” comment about the innocent victims of 9/11 was publicized.

The conclusion one must draw from such examples isn’t that every institution has its bad apples but rather that, at least in the liberal arts in America, moral turpitude and political hucksterism pervades higher education. Radical criminals with questionable academic credentials flourish in a milieu that bristles with hostility toward real scholars who don’t toe the party line—witness the case of former Harvard President Lawrence Summers.

Individuals with prison records or FBI rap sheets don’t get into major educational institutions because they fudge their resumes. They get in because they share the political dogmas of those who hire them—and they flourish for the same reason. Angela Davis isn’t a “University Professor” because of her scholarship. She is there because of her politics.

What The Professors ultimately reveals isn’t a list of instructors that students can avoid, but a corrupt, politicized system that has contempt for the very idea of liberal education.

What’s most amazing about Ann Coulter’s book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, is the amount of intellectual meat she packs into 281 breezy, barb-filled pages. Among the topics the blonde bomb-thrower discusses in some depth are the following: liberal jurisprudence, privacy rights and abortion, Joe Wilson’s modest career and inflated ego, and the solid record of failure in American public schools. The topics of Intelligent Design and Darwinism, to which the last eighty pages of text are devoted, are analyzed in even greater detail.

As one would expect from an author with a legal background, Supreme Court cases are high on Coulter’s hit-list—especially the idea of a “living Constitution.” Citing various cases-in-point, Coulter shows that this popular doctrine is nothing more than a paralegal pretext for making the Constitution say whatever liberal judges want it to say. Though such a philosophy grants to the nation’s founding document all the integrity of a bound and gagged assault victim, it at least has the virtue of mirroring liberals’ self-referential view of morality.

Another dogma that Coulter skewers is the liberal commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Punish the Perp.” This counterintuitive principle not only rejects the link between incarceration and lower crime rates, it also permits benevolent judges (like Clinton federal court nominee Frederica Massiah-Jackson) to shorten the sentence of child rapists so that other innocent children can pay the price for society’s sins.

An unexpected bonus in this chapter is the author’s extended sidebar on Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of Boston who, as his own correspondence shows, knew Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty but chose, for ideological and financial reasons, to portray them as innocent victims. In a related chapter, “The Martyr: Willie Horton,” Coulter provides detailed information about Horton’s crimes, Michael Dukakis’ furlough program, and the precise nature of the Horton ads aired in the 1988 presidential campaign

Continuing the religious imagery, Coulter asserts in chapter five that abortion is the “holiest sacrament” of the “church of liberalism.” For women this sacrament secures their “right to have sex with men they don’t want to have children with.” A corollary of this less-than-exalted principle is the right to suck the brains out of partially born infants. How far liberal politicians will go to safeguard this sacrament whose name must not be spoken (Euphemisms are “choice,” “reproductive freedom,” and “family planning.”) is shown by an amendment offered by Senator Chuck Schumer that would exclude anti-abortion protestors from bankruptcy protection. How low these same pols will go is illustrated by the character assassination of Judge Charles Pickering—a man honored by the brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers but slimed by liberals at his confirmation hearing as racially insensitive. Coulter notes that the unspoken reason for this “Borking” of Pickering was the judge’s prior criticism of Roe v. Wade.

The single chapter that Coulter’s critics have honed in on is the one that exposes the liberal “Doctrine of Infallibility.” This religiously resonant phrase applies to individuals who promote the Left’s partisan agenda while immunizing themselves from criticism by touting their victim-status. In addition to the 9/11 “Jersey Girls,” Coulter identifies Joe Wilson, Cindy Sheehan, Max Cleland, and John Murtha as persons who possess, at least by Maureen Dowd’s lights, “absolute moral authority.” Curiously, this exalted status isn’t accorded victims who don’t push liberal agendas. Perhaps the fact that Republican veterans outnumber their Democrat counterparts in Congress, 87 to 62, has something to do with this inconsistency.

Coulter’s next chapter, “The Liberal Priesthood: Spare the Rod, Spoil the Teacher,” focuses on the partisanship, compensation, and incompetence level of American teachers. A crucial statistic in these pages concerns the “correlation [that exists] between poor student achievement and time spent in U.S. public schools.” Comments by Thomas Sowell and Albert Shanker also stand out. Sowell notes that college students with low SAT and ACT scores are more likely to major in education and that “teachers who have the lowest scores are the most likely to remain in the profession.” From a different perspective, the late President of the American Federation of Teachers stated, with refreshing bluntness, “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.” The words of John Dewey, a founder of America’s public education system, also fit nicely into Coulter’s state-of-the-classroom overview: “You can’t make Socialists out of individualists—children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.” Coulter responds, “You also can’t make socialists out of people who can read, which is probably why Democrats think the public schools have nearly achieved Aristotelian perfection.”

The last third of Godless focuses on matters scientific. Chapter seven, “The Left’s War on Science,” serves as an appetizer for Coulter’s evolutionary piece de resistance. Prior to that main course, Coulter provides a litany of examples that illustrate the left’s contempt for scientific data that doesn’t comport with its worldview. Exhibits include the mendacious marketing of AIDS as an equal opportunity disease, the hysterical use of anecdotal evidence to ban silicon breast implants, and the firestorm arising from Lawrence Summer’s heretical speculation about male and female brain differences.

The remaining chapters of Godless all deal with Darwinism. Nowhere else can one find a tart-tongued compendium of information that not only presents a major argument for intelligent design but also exposes the blatant dishonesty of “Darwiniacs” who continue to employ evidence (such as the Miller-Urey experiment, Ernst Haeckel’s embryo drawings, and the famous peppered moth experiment) that they know is outdated or fraudulent.

Within this bracing analysis, Coulter employs the observations of such biological and philosophical heavyweights as Stephen Gould, Richard Lewontin, Richard Dawkins, Michael Behe, and Karl Popper. The price of the whole book is worth the information contained in these chapters about the statistical improbability of random evolution, the embarrassing absence of “transitional” fossils, and the inquisitorial attitude that prevails among many scientists (and most liberals) when discussing these matters. Unlike biologist Richard Lewontin, who candidly admits that a prior commitment to materialism informs his allegiance to evolution, most of his colleagues (and certainly most of the liberal scribblers Coulter sets on the road to extinction) won’t concede that Darwinism is a corollary, rather than a premise, of their godlessness.

Coulter’s final chapter serves as a thought-provoking addendum to her searing cross-examination of evolution’s star witnesses. “The Aped Crusader” displays the devastating social consequences that have thus far attended Darwinism. From German and American eugenicists (including Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger), to Aryan racists, to the infanticidal musings of Princeton’s Peter Singer, Darwinian evolution boasts a political and philosophical heritage that could only be envied by the likes of Charles Manson. Yet it is a history ignored by liberals for whom Darwin’s theory provides what they want above all else—a creation myth that sanctifies their sexual urges, sanctions abortion, and disposes of God.

Coulter’s book is clearly not a systematic argument for the idea that liberalism is a godless religion. Indeed, prior to the material on evolution, the concept is treated more as a clever theme for chapter headings than as a serious intellectual proposition. In those final chapters, however, Coulter manages to present a cogent, sustained argument that actually begins to link modern liberalism (or more specifically, leftism) to an atheistic perspective. At the very least Coulter succeeds in raising an important issue—namely, that American courts currently ignore the religious or quasi-religious character of a philosophy that pervades public institutions and is propagated with public funds. This fact, if honestly recognized, would render contemporary church-state jurisprudence untenable. The Court would have to recognize, as a clever man once said, that the elimination of metaphysics equals a metaphysic of elimination. Put more simply, judges would have to come to terms with the fact that every philosophy, including “liberalism,” swims in the same intellectual current as religion.

Thus far, the mainstream media have focused almost all their attention on Coulter’s take-no-prisoners rhetorical style—and particularly on the “insensitive” remarks about those 9/11 widows who seem to be “enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.” Clearly, diplomatic language is not Coulter’s forte, as one would also gather from this representative zinger: “I don’t particularly care if liberals believe in God. In fact, I would be crestfallen to discover any liberals in heaven.”

What undercuts the liberals’ case against Coulter, however, is their own (not always tacit) endorsement of vile epithets that are regularly directed against President Bush and his supporters by the likes of Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, and a gaggle of celebrity politicos. Coulter employs the same linguistic standard against liberals (with a touch of humor) that they regularly use (with somber faces and dogmatic conviction) when they accuse conservatives of being racist homophobes who gladly send youngsters to war under false pretences to line the pockets of Halliburton. Hate-speech of this stripe is old-hat for leftists.

Until Air America, Helen Thomas, and most Democrat constituencies alter their rhetoric, I see no reason for conservatives to denounce Coulter for using, more truthfully, the same harsh language that leftists have employed, with no regard for accuracy, since the time of Lenin. When liberals denounce communist tyrants as fervently as they do real Nazis, then it will be time for Coulter to cool the rhetoric. Until that time her “verbal reprisals” serve a useful function within an intellectual marketplace that resembles a commodities pit more than a debating society.