The D’Souzas

A recent article at Jihad Watch featured Robert Spencer half-facetiously holding a kind of contest, in which he solicited readers to submit the most appropriate title for Dinesh D’Souza, given D’Souza’s most recent gaffe, in which he wrote—in response to Spencer—that:

The Shia and the Sunni have not been fighting for centuries. Historically speaking, they have not been fighting at all.

This is not all. After Spencer responded to this a few days ago with a list of many Sunni-Shia wars and conflicts over the centuries, D’Souza responded again, in effect saying that all those wars and conflicts were not religious in nature, but rather territorial and political. Spencer, of course, easily refuted this, then—as we noted up top—he opened up the floor to his readers for a “Jihad Watch Contest” to nominate D’Souza for the most appropriate slur to mirror the one D’Souza slung at Spencer, when he called Spencer “the Alan Wolfe of the right.”

While I grant it is fun and educational, within the delimited purview of the duck-in-the-barrel target D’Souza so juicily offers us, to be focusing on D’Souza this way, there is the danger that in doing so we will lose sight of the larger PC Multiculturalism that not only enables a D’Souza to have the degree of traction he enjoys, but also nourishes him with much of the pre-packaged substance he purveys. The conceit that Shia-Sunni wars and conflicts have not been religious but rather political is hardly one that D’Souza invented: it is one of the many axioms that fit together in the jigsaw paradigm of PC Multiculturalism—by which most of the military pathologies of Islamic history are comfortably, simplistically and (oh, the irony!) parochially interpreted as “not really religious, but actually politico-cultural in nature”—as though that distinction pertained in Islam as it has in the West for centuries.

All the Jihad Watch readers who have jumped into the Contest to have their fun demonstrate this alacrity by which their happy zeal to zing D’Souza crosses over into a tendency to delimit the problem to D’Souza himself, or slightly better to the D’Souzas of Academe or, at best—at a slightly wider magnitude of focus—the various subculture of “Elites” throughout the spheres of Academe, Media, the Arts and Politics, of which D’Souza has become one particularly clownish representative.

In the spirit of my blog, then, whose raison d’être is to call attention to the much wider and deeper problem all around us in our Western societies—which our preoccupation with pillorying at “Elites” tends to ignore and obfuscate—, I submit my own title that best describes and demeans Dinesh D’Souza:

An Unremarkable Man Breathing the Air.