The Enemy At Home

by Dinesh D'Souza

  A writer on one Muslim Web site termed Abu Ghraib “a mirror of the pornographic lifestyle of America that has fun while it tramples on Muslim hearts.” Anouar Abdel Malek, a columnist for the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, wrote that Abu Ghraib reflects the kind of sexual depravity that is normal in America but that revolts the conscience of traditional Muslims. As Muslims, he wrote, “We feel as though we are knocking on the gates of hell, and all hope is about to abandon us.”4 A Muslim businessman told me in Istanbul, “Abu Ghraib showed a side of America that many of us have suspected but tried not to believe. Now we see that it is true. There is a sickness in American society that goes beyond a few soldiers who got carried away. What that female American soldier in uniform did to the Arab man, strip him of his manhood and pull him on a leash, this is what America wants to do to the Muslim world.”

  Although I do not believe that Abu Ghraib reflects America’s predatory intentions toward the Muslim world, I can see why Muslims would see it this way. In one crucial respect, however, the Muslim critics of Abu Ghraib were wrong. Contrary to their assertions, Abu Ghraib did not reflect the shared values of America, it reflected the sexual immodesty of liberal America. Lynndie England and Charles Graner were two wretched individuals from red America who were trying to act out the fantasies of blue America. Casting aside all traditional notions of decency, propriety, and morality, they simply lived by the code of self-fulfillment. If it feels good, it must be right. This was bohemianism, West Virginia–style.

  At some level, the cultural left recognized this, which is why most of its comments about Abu Ghraib assiduously avoided the issue of sexual deviancy. The left’s embarrassment on this matter seems to have drawn on class prejudice. For some liberals, soldiers like Graner and England were poor white trash getting into trouble again. Of course if Graner and England were professors at an elite liberal arts college, their videotaped orgies might easily have become the envy of academia. If they were artists staging these pictures in a loft in Soho they could have been hailed as pioneers and encouraged by leftist admirers to apply for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. But being low-life Appalachians, Graner and England inspired none of these elevated thoughts. Instead, liberals moved opportunistically to attack the military and discredit its prisoner interrogation policies—even though these policies had nothing to do with what actually happened. Conservatives completely missed the significance of Abu Ghraib. Chagrined because they knew how bad the incident made America look, conservatives sought desperately to minimize Abu Ghraib, to call it a prank, to explain it as an interrogation technique, to say it wasn’t typical. In trying to defend the indefensible, conservatives became cheap apologists for liberal debauchery.

  IN A DEEPER sense, the Muslim anguish over Abu Ghraib reflects a broader Muslim concern about American sexual depravity. Many Muslims believe that Americans are sexual perverts, that sexual perversion destroys the family, and that the United States is trying to impose its deviant ways on the Islamic world. Islamic radicals continually exploit these issues. Referring to the Americans, bin Laden said in a 1998 interview, “They want to skin us from our manhood.” By encouraging women’s liberation and the free mixing of the sexes, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, charges, America is trying “to spread cultural values that lead to moral corruption.” In this way, he said, the United States is trying to emasculate Muslim men and weaken Islamic society. Speaking at a mosque in Riyadh, the radical sheikh Fahd Rahman al-Abyan said, “The West is a society in which under-age girls know what married women do and more, a society where the woman does as she pleases even if she is married, a society in which the number of illegitimate children approaches and sometimes surpasses the number of children from permitted unions. These putrid ideas…are being pushed on us in the name of women’s rights.”5

  Years ago Sayyid Qutb wrote that no society that undermines the family can be considered to be civilized. Sexual depravity is the essence of jahilliya, Qutb argued, because it destroys the elemental unit of civilization. Among the bedouins in pre-Islamic Arabia, he wrote, “Fornication was rampant in various forms and was considered something to be proud of.” Qutb noted that a typical bedouin woman had relations with so many men that when she became pregnant, the tribe would wait for the child to be delivered and then determine the father with the assistance of “an expert in recognizing resemblances.” Qutb suggested that precisely this kind of sexual and social chaos is increasingly characteristic of America. The new jahilliya is the consequence of “this animalistic behavior which you call the free mixing of the sexes, this vulgarity which you call the emancipation of women.”6

  Critiques of this sort strike a deep chord among traditional Muslims today. Tariq Ramadan points out that, even in the West, many young Muslim women “wear headscarves and give visible signs of the modesty in which they wish to be approached.” In Ramadan’s view these Muslims represent “a liberation movement within Islam,” a movement that seeks liberation from Western feminism. If freedom is defined in the West as sexual liberation, then Muslims have decided to adopt “another way of freedom.”7 In Muslim countries this resistance is nearly universal. The Turkish sociologist Nilufer Gole says that most Muslims have concluded that freedom in the West basically means freedom from the marriage contract, “the freedom of seduction.”

  The distinguished Muslim scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes, “The most basic right of a child is to have two parents, and this right is taken away from nearly half of the children in Western society.” America’s social system, he remarks, “places the desires of the individual above responsibility in marriage to one’s spouse and children.” Nasr argues that the idea that people own their bodies and can do as they please with them “is totally alien to Islam.” Even so, Nasr charges that this is precisely the doctrine that America is trying to impose on the Muslim world.8

  Imagine the outcry if Muslim countries routinely convened international conferences that featured testimony and resolutions on social life in America. One can envision the testimony of American children wounded by divorce, or graphic details of the various sexual diseases that homosexuals routinely contract, or vivid images of American women aborting their offspring. Imagine if Islamic countries funded massive programs to increase or decrease the American population, change the status of American women, pass laws to alter the structure of authority in the American family! No doubt Americans would be outraged and would act swiftly to stop such arrogant meddling. Muslims charge that the United States is interfering in precisely this way to destroy the patriarchal family in the Islamic world. As one Western-educated Muslim told me in India, “I wish you Americans would take your family values and shove them up your ass.”

  It is not hard to understand why many Muslims might feel this way. There is widespread agreement in America that the family is in crisis. The divorce rate in America is 50 percent. One in three American children is born out of wedlock. One-third of American children are living apart from their biological father. Even in two-parent families, two-thirds of women with young children have full-time jobs, so most children under school age are cared for in day-care centers. There have been more than 30 million abortions in America in the past three decades. The very concept of family no longer seems to refer to a married couple with children—it is now an umbrella term covering cohabiting couples, “blended families” resulting from divorce and remarriage, single-parent households, lesbian couples with adopted children, and so on. Americans are fairly accustomed to all this, but from the Muslim point of view, might not America’s social reality reflect precisely the jahilliya that Qutb warned about?

  It may seem odd, given the state of the American family, that a group of Americans would seek to attack and transform the domestic institutions of other cultures where the family remains intact, most children grow up with two parents and a host of relatives, and where divorce rates remain extremely low. Yet for the past three decades, the cultural left has been conducting a global campaign to impos
e liberal family values on non-Western cultures. Nicholas Kristof expresses the rationale for this enterprise: “The central moral challenge we will face in this century is to address gender equality in the developing world.” The problem, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris confess, is that most of the world subscribes to traditional values. Therefore, “Cultural change is a necessary condition for gender equality.” Feminist Ellen Willis calls for a “serious long-range strategy” to combat what she calls “authoritarian patriarchal religion, culture, and morality…all over the world, including the Islamic world.”9 Consequently the family has become ground zero in the global culture war.

  The campaign to undermine traditional values worldwide is spearheaded by feminist groups like the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, population control groups like Planned Parenthood International, homosexual rights groups like InterPride, philanthropic organizations like the Ford Foundation, and human rights groups like Amnesty International. Most Americans, who are well aware of the spread of American popular culture abroad, know very little about this campaign. Planned Parenthood, an organization that receives one third of its funds from the U.S. government, has clinics all over the world that distribute condoms to young people and provide abortions to teenage girls without their parents’ permission or knowledge. When homosexuals are arrested in Muslim countries for conduct that violates the law of those countries, groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch demand their immediate release and sometimes pay for their legal defense. Feminist groups provide funding and legal support to indigenous activists seeking to pressure non-Western courts and governments to make divorce as easy to obtain as it is in the West.

  With the help of ideologues like Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland who served as U.N. high commissioner for human rights, the left works through international agencies to pass resolutions undermining the traditional family. This campaign has been going on since 1979, when the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) first defined women’s rights in opposition to the family and proposed abortion as a “reproductive right” protected by international law. These rights were affirmed and extended at the 1994 Cairo conference on population, the 1995 Beijing conference on women, and the 2002 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. Armed with the proceedings of these international meetings, the left proclaims a whole set of newly enacted rights and then browbeats non-Western governments to change their laws or be declared in violation of international norms and treaties. For the cultural left, “international law” provides a mechanism to penetrate the otherwise-opaque barrier of national sovereignty.

  What are the values the left seeks to impose on the rest of the world? One is population control. The left wants to achieve this by providing easy access to contraception to all women, including teenage girls and unmarried women. A second is the legalization of prostitution, a cause that Hillary Clinton has championed on the international stage.10 A third is no-fault divorce, so that one partner can dissolve the marriage without the other partner’s consent. A fourth is abortion, which feminist groups regard as central to female autonomy. A fifth is the elimination of the concept of the husband as the head of the household—this is seen as a violation of gender equality. The left also seeks to prohibit parents from using corporal punishment in the home. Finally the left seeks to give cohabiting couples and homosexual couples the same rights as married couples.

  Seeking to avoid the stigma of foreign intervention, the left prosecutes its agenda through local “front groups.” One such group is Women Living Under Muslim Laws, an international network that promotes feminism and abortion rights in Islamic countries. While the group poses as an indigenous effort, and is typically described that way in the press, its base is in London. Its funding comes largely from the West. The affiliates listed on its Web site constitute a menagerie of Western leftist organizations: the Netherlands-based Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights, the San Francisco–based Global Fund for Women, the London-based Women Against Fundamentalisms, the New York–based Equality Now, the Belgium-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and the New York–based Al-Fatiha Foundation for gay, bisexual, and transgender Muslims.

  Recognizing the controversial nature of its project, the left promotes its agenda through neutral-sounding rhetoric. Once the language is adopted, leftist organizations then spell out the implications and claim the rights implicit in the benign-sounding generalities. Rather than call for non-Western women to have fewer children, the left speaks of a woman’s right to determine the number and spacing of her pregnancies. While handing out contraceptives to unmarried young girls in traditional cultures, Planned Parenthood claims it is merely providing “equal access” to “family planning services.” Even as they file lawsuits to promote no-fault divorce, feminist groups justify their actions as part of an international campaign against domestic violence. (Human Rights Watch claims that domestic violence occurs in 90 percent of Muslim homes in Pakistan, a charge that virtually declares the Muslim family pathological.)11 When Planned Parenthood advocates abortion rights and performs abortions abroad, the term “abortion” is rarely mentioned; instead, the group speaks of “reproductive rights.” Patriarchy is undermined through resolutions asserting a woman’s right to “equal respect” and “equal status” in the home. Rather than insist that parents stop using corporal punishment, the left promotes “children’s rights” that include a right against cruel and unusual punishment—defined to include all forms of corporal punishment. The left seeks to legalize prostitution by speaking of “workers’ rights” and then defining the term to include “sex workers.” Feminist and gay rights groups seek to legitimize cohabitation and homosexual marriage by calling for the elimination of “discrimination” in family status, and then redefining the concept of family to include unmarried and homosexual couples.

  Despite the left’s camouflage, many non-Western people are now aware of the agenda that is being thrust upon their cultures against their will. The left’s campaign against the traditional family has produced widespread social disruption and political protest in many traditional cultures. When an international coalition of liberal groups recently convinced the South African high court to legalize homosexual marriage, South Africa became the only country with a majority nonwhite population to permit gay marriage. The decision has been vociferously protested in this socially conservative country. Along the same lines, protests have erupted in Latin America over lawsuits filed by the U.S.-based feminist group Women’s Link Worldwide. Funded by the Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Institute, this group seeks to overturn relatively stringent divorce and abortion laws on the grounds that these laws violate international human rights provisions. Recently the group succeeded in convincing Colombia’s high court to strike down the country’s comprehensive antiabortion law. Asian countries trying to reduce sexual trafficking have heatedly complained about resolutions at international conferences establishing prostitution as a basic right.

  Let us remember that in most of the non-Western world the family is not a venue for self-expression; it is the basic unit of survival. Marriage is venerated as a social institution because children depend on their parents to raise them, and parents depend on their children to support them in old age. There is little or nothing available in the way of social security and none of these societies provides welfare to single mothers. Children are generally viewed as a blessing in non-Western cultures. In poorer societies children—especially male children—can work to supplement the family income. A large family provides better social insurance for parents as they become dependent. Very few people in traditional societies share the Western liberal view that they should have fewer children because they cannot afford more, or because children will get in the way of their life’s plans, or because birth control is a moral duty owed to the planet.

  Drawing on the World Values Survey, a comprehensive study of global
opinion, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris write that in non-Western cultures “both men and women willingly adhere to the traditional division of sex roles in the home. Men in these societies are not actively restricting and silencing women’s demands. Instead, both sexes believe that women and men should have distinct roles.” As a consequence, “There is a growing gap between the egalitarian beliefs and feminist values of Western societies and the traditional beliefs in poorer societies.” Rejection of homosexuality is “deeply entrenched” in the non-Western world. According to the survey, the practice is opposed by 71 percent in India, 92 percent in China, 94 percent in Iran, and 99 percent in Bangladesh and Egypt. Nor is the gap on social issues between the West and the non-West shrinking. While younger people in the West tend to be more liberal than their elders on questions like premarital sex, divorce, and homosexuality, Inglehart and Norris find that in non-Western cultures “there is usually little difference between younger and older cohorts, with the exception of abortion, where there is evidence of a shift toward greater disapproval among younger generations.”12

  Nowhere is the resistance to the cultural left’s agenda more vehement than in the Muslim world. Commenting on the global feminist agenda on an Islamic Web site, Khalid Baig writes, “It is hard to imagine a more diabolical and wicked program to destroy Muslim societies from within, and create the same mess there as is visible in the Western world.”13 While Muslims have no objection to family planning, they are deeply insulted by the efforts of Western groups to pressure Muslim families to have fewer children. Abortion is another issue in which there is virtual unanimity among Muslims. One of the Prophet Muhammad’s most celebrated reforms was to stop the bedouin practice of killing newborn girls. Muslims view their opposition to abortion as deriving from a principle of life’s sacredness that was established at the very beginning of Islam. Consequently many Muslims are enraged when leftist groups like Planned Parenthood use American money and influence to promote abortion rights and abortion services in Muslim countries.