Contra-Contra D'Souza

I've not yet read Dinesh D'Souza's new book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, and not sure that I will anytime soon, but I do know that a lot of conservative pundits and bloggers have been panning it for its underlying "America is at fault for Islamic terrorists" theme.

Well, there's at least one social conservative commentator that I have a great deal of respect for, Stephen Mosher of the Population Research Institute, who thinks D'Souza is pretty much on the money:

The United States, both directly and through international institutions like the World Bank, has been exporting various social pathologies into relatively innocent and untouched corners of the world for going on 40 years now under the guise of "family planning" and "reproductive health." Billions of dollars a year are being poured into programs that promote abortion, fund coercive sterilization and contraceptive campaigns, reach into the schools with pornographic sex education programs, fund anti-family and anti-child radio and television programs, undermine primary health care, and encourage governments to intrude into the private lives of their citizens. Such programs create bitter resentment in Muslim and non-Muslim countries alike, as we at PRI have documented over and over again.

Let me be clear: It is not because women in the West have abortions and premarital sex that bin Laden and his pals attacked us. They were bent on violence in any case.

But the promotion by the U.S. and other "modern democracies" of abortion, divorce, adultery, and premarital sex in Muslim countries cannot help but generate sympathy and new recruits for those who would attack the "Great Satan." One can understand the resentment of even moderate Muslims when Western-funded population controllers come knocking at the door of their houses, bearing their human pesticides and insisting that their wives be rendered sterile. Or their righteous anger when their young child arrives home from school with a pornographic sex ed booklet, funded by a grant from USAID.