Stanley Kurtz on The Enemy at Home on National Review Online

re: "Why is the United States engaged in a war against Islamic terrorists? The Left blames the war on American foreign policy, while the Right holds that America is being scapegoated for the Muslim Middle East’s own failure to modernize. In his controversial new book, The Enemy at Home, conservative social critic Dinesh D’Souza rejects both of these explanations. Islam is perfectly compatible with modernity, argues D’Souza. The real root of the terror war, says D’Souza, is that, like many other traditional peoples throughout the world, Muslims are being shocked into anti-Western radicalism by the decadent post-Sixties culture nowadays aggressively spread across the globe by the secular Left./In “War of Cultures,” I take issue with D’Souza, arguing that the contemporary cultural Left merely aggravates a profound and already-existing conflict between Islamic society and modernity — a clash between tradition and modernity more thorough-going and prone to violence than in any other part of the globe. D’Souza’s theme of cultural incitement, rightly understood, I argue, points toward a deeper incompatibility between Islamic society and the demands of modern life — an incompatibility that has a great deal to do with the widespread Middle Eastern practice of cousin marriage. If this is so, then we are led to take up the fundamental question of the causes of the terror war in a new light..."...