Dinesh D’Souza and I both spoke at FreedomFest in Las Vegas in July, although unfortunately we didn’t debate each other. At one point we had a brief and friendly chat, during which I noticed that he was carrying a well-thumbed copy of Who Speaks for Islam by John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed. And now he has written another column about the book, showing that clearly he takes it very, very seriously -- demonstrating once again that when he speaks about Islam, Dinesh D’Souza has no true grasp of the subject, and is completely out of his depth.
“Who Speaks For Islam,” by Dinesh D’Souza, September 15:
Esposito a “leading scholar of Islam": Esposito has taken $20 million from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and renamed his Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. Prince Alwaleed tried to give $10 million to New York City after 9/11, but Rudolph Giuliani returned the check after Alwaleed suggested that 9/11 was a consequence of U.S. foreign policy.
That alone, of course, doesn’t indicate what John Esposito is all about. But there is more about whom he has praised and whom he has damned that reveals a great deal about where he really stands. Esposito has called Bernard Lewis, whom D’Souza has repeatedly cited and praised, “one of the Darth Vaders of the world.”
Esposito has praised Muslim Brotherhood Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who advocates suicide bombings, as a champion of a “reformist interpretation of Islam and its relationship to democracy, pluralism and human rights.”
Esposito has spoken at a Council on American-Islamic Relations fundraiser in order to “show solidarity not only with the Holy Land Fund [that is, the Holy Land Foundation], but also with CAIR.” The Holy Land Foundation is accused of funneling money to the jihad terror group Hamas, and CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in the case. CAIR is a spinoff of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which is listed in the 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum on strategy in the U.S. as part of its “grand jihad” aimed at “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.”
Esposito has said of a man who pleaded guilty to aiding the jihad terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad that “Sami Al-Arian’s a very good friend of mine.”
Esposito has co-edited a book with Azzam Tamimi. Palestinian political scientist Muhammad Muslih calls Tamimi “a Hamas member.” Tamimi has said: “I admire the Taliban; they are courageous.” He has said: “I support Hamas.”
D’Souza goes on:
D’Souza takes Esposito’s findings at face value, but there is ample reason to treat them with reserve. In The Weekly Standard, Robert Satloff exposes yet more that is wrong with the Saudi-funded Islamic apologist John Esposito’s soothing “No Extremists Here” survey of the Islamic world:
The cover-up is even worse. The full data from the 9/11 question show that, in addition to the 13.5 percent, there is another 23.1 percent of respondents--300 million Muslims--who told pollsters the attacks were in some way justified. Esposito and Mogahed don’t utter a word about the vast sea of intolerance in which the radicals operate.
And then there is the more fundamental fraud of using the 9/11 question as the measure of “who is a radical.” Amazing as it sounds, according to Esposito and Mogahed, the proper term for a Muslim who hates America, wants to impose Sharia law, supports suicide bombing, and opposes equal rights for women but does not “completely” justify 9/11 is . . . “moderate.”
And Hillel Fradkin, reviewing the book, notes a curious feature for what is supposed to be a study of survey data:
To a certain degree, the authors admit the bias of their presentation: “The study revealed far more than what we could possibly cover in one book, so we chose the most significant, and at times, surprising conclusions to share with you. Here are just some of those counterintuitive discoveries.” But this admission is ridiculously inadequate. After all, this is a book, not an article. In the end, the authors betray their own standard that “data should lead the discourse,” because there is no data. A reader without deep pockets cannot easily remedy this deficiency: the Gallup Organization charges $28,500 to access the data.
If not data, then what fills the pages of this book? In effect, we are given an opinion piece by Esposito and Mogahed—one not unlike the op-eds they decry, only much longer. Like op-eds, it is buttressed by anecdotal evidence, much of which is not even drawn from the survey. Indeed, given the partiality of the material they do draw from the survey, it too must be counted as anecdotal, notwithstanding the percentage signs which are scattered here and there. Moreover, the conclusions that Esposito and Mogahed draw, as well as their policy prescriptions, are indistinguishable from Esposito’s opinions, as expressed and disseminated in his books and articles long before Gallup polled its first Muslim. As in almost every Esposito product, the book even includes a chapter devoted to a description of the religion of Islam.
But to accept this book as an extended op-ed is not quite adequate. After all, Esposito claimed to apply a higher standard—that of “a man [who] should look for what is, and not what he thinks should be.” Seen in this light, the book is a confidence game or fraud, of which Esposito should be ashamed. So too should the Gallup Organization, its publisher.
How do they define these terms? D’Souza doesn’t say. He probably doesn’t know that “rule of law” and “religious toleration,” in particular, can have vastly different meanings to Muslims from the meanings that most Americans take for granted.
D’Souza then goes on to try to portray the vast majority of Muslims as traditional conservatives:
Can we get percentages on Muslim approval of polygamy? Wife-beating? Honor killing? Jihad violence? Islamic supremacism? I didn’t think so.
This book is a huge embarrassment to some conservatives who, based on no data and very little familiarity with the Muslim world, have been portraying Muslims as violent theocrats who reject modern science, modern democracy and modern capitalism and spend most of their day performing honor killings and genital mutilations. This portrait of the Muslim world is about as accurate as that of a Muslim who believes that typical Americans live their daily lives according to the values of “Natural Born Killers” and “Brokeback Mountain.”
At FreedomFest when we talked briefly, I invited D’Souza to debate again, in a longer format than the rushed CPAC affair. He agreed, although he hastened to say that, well, we would have to find the proper venue, etc. I hereby repeat the invitation.
