Conservative Dinesh D'Souza wrote a widely disdained book called The Enemy At Home (The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11) in which he outlines the role that America's social liberalism played in the attacks of 9/11. As one might expect, it was received with great hostility among the left. It also, however, with little exception was met with derision by the right. The only thing surprising to me is Dinesh's surprise at the right's reaction, expressed in a four part series in the National Review where he complains about being silenced:

I expected, in this book, to stir the angry passions of the Left. Any book with the subtitle “The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11” cannot expect to be well received by leftists. Sure enough, the New York Times and the Washington Post have raged against my book. Alan Wolfe portrayed me as a follower of bin Laden, and a senior editor of Esquire even threatened to fight me and send me to the hospital. I am constantly crossing swords with leftist professors and pundits who combine small-mindedness with viciousness, and so this line of attack was entirely expected.

Much stranger have been the petulant, even belligerent, attacks from the Right. [...] What I say may be flawed or wrongheaded, and I am happy to learn from my mistakes, but why the savagery of the attacks? What heresy have I committed that the angry men of the Right have drawn their daggers against me?

Mr. D'Souza needs to find himself some new friends. Somebody, somewhere along the line needed to pull him aside and say that this book was publicly going to sting the right as much as, if not more than, the left. But unless D'Souza is being disingenuous with his surprise, nobody did. He's surrounded himself with yes men or a rather questionable ideological cocoon. Maybe what he said truly needed to be said, but he should not have been surprised at the reaction.

Conservatives have spent the last five years arguing against the proposition that 9/11 was provoked by our own behavior, specifically our support for Israel and our imperialist tendencies. Even if that argument is completely wrong, and I don't believe that it is, conservatives have a great deal invested in that argument and are not going to change their minds simply because we can say it was provoked by the our American opponents.

The best response I have read, to date, has come from Jonah Goldberg:

It needs to be said that the problem with D'Souza's case is one of emphasis. If one were to make a list of important reasons why the Muslim world or Islamists in particular want to kill us, just about every reasonable person would put the D'Souza thesis on the list, though partisans of particular schools might rank it higher or lower depending on their agendas. But very few would rank our alleged pagan depravity at the top of the list. And virtually no one, save D'Souza himself, would say that our pagan depravity is pretty much the entire list. [...]

There's something about The Enemy at Home that gets the Irish up, even in a guy named Goldberg. I can criticize and complain about my brother all I like, but if my brother bothers somebody outside the family, well, that's just too bad. Similarly, Ted Kennedy may or may not be a Caligulan carbuncle, but if the jihadists want to behead him for it, they'll have to get through me first. In short, if our debauchery fuels Islamic terrorists to kill us, the blame for that still resides entirely with the terrorists. One can wholeheartedly agree that some Americans make poor use of their freedom, and that certain behavior shouldn't be promoted, but that's our problem. And if it makes it harder for us to make our case to the Muslim world, then harder it must be.