Matt Ortega

Think Progress posted the findings of a recent Brookings Institution survey on Arab attitudes towards the United States. The results showed 80 percent of those survey cited American foreign policy as the root of their criticisms of the United States. Only 12 percent cited “American values” as the primary reason.

These findings contradict the central thesis of the craptacular Dinesh D’Souza book blaming anti-Americanism and the September 11 terrorist attacks on liberals and popular culture. (And, of course, liberals are responsible for popular culture because conservatives are major tools and produce lame programming like this.)

Media Matters:

D’Souza wrote in his Washington Post op-ed that he has faced an “onslaught” of criticism because his book “argue[s] that the American left bears a measure of responsibility for the volcano of anger from the Muslim world that produced the 9/11 attacks.” In his January 25 op-ed in The Christian Science Monitor, D’Souza asserted that Muslim distaste for the “popular culture” of “blue” America “can blossom into the kind of anti-American pathology that partly fueled the 9/11 attacks.” Yet in the book itself, D’Souza does not argue that the cultural left “bears a measure of responsibility” for provoking the anger of the 9-11 hijackers or that it “partly fueled” 9-11. Rather, he asserts that the “cultural left” is the “primary cause” of the “visceral rage” that produced the terrorists who attacked America, and that “without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.” [emphasis added]