Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) is digging in on his contention that President Obama is motivated by a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” ideology — and citing a very interesting source for the argument, the right-wing author Dinesh D’Souza, who has written sympathetically of Islamic extremism against what he has described as America’s decadent cultural liberalism.
As National Review’s Robert Costa reported over the weekend:
Gingrich says that D’Souza has made a “stunning insight” into Obama’s behavior — the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.”
“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”
Gingrich cited a recent column D’Souza wrote in Forbes — promoting his upcoming book on the theme that Obama’s central motivation is to weaken America, viewing it as an evil colonial power: “Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”
In an interview with ABC News this morning, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs responded to Gingrich by accusing him of trying to appeal to those people “who don’t believe the president was born in this country.” That is, Gingrich was accused of attempting to use coded language for the birther movement.
“You would normally expect better of somebody who held the position of Speaker of the House but look it is political season and most people will say anything and Newt Gingrich does that on a genuinely, on a regular basis,” Gibbs said.
ABC also provided an interesting fact-check of D’Souza and Gingrich’s contentions about the alleged influence of Barack Obama Sr. upon President Obama. First of all, the younger Obama barely knew his father, whose absence defined the president’s young life more than any presence. And beyond that, whatever his other faults, Obama Sr. was known to belong to the wing of Kenyan politics that promoted a reformist accommodation and cooperation with the West, and was critical of the flaws of Kenya’s socialist economic model.
In response, Gingrich has responded with two tweets — reaffirming D’Souza. First there was this:
Thrilled that WH (@PressSec) decided to highlight Dinesh D’Souza’s excellent article in @Forbes this AM on @GMA http://tinyurl.com/389ay2d
Followed by this:
Here is the article “How Obama Thinks”: http://tinyurl.com/389ay2d Let me know what you think.
It should, of course, be noted that this is not the first time that D’Souza wrote about a controversial idea. D’Souza previously made waves in 2006 with his book, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, in which he wrote that the American left was to blame for the 9/11 attacks, by provoking the anger of Muslims and traditional societies overseas through the export of a socially liberal society, gender equality and permissive sexual mores. In the book, he also wrote admiringly of religious-based societies around the world — including a favorable description of an Ayatollah poster on the streets of Tehran — and calls upon American conservatives to reach out to Muslim societies around a shared desire to defeat the cultural left.
As he wrote in the introduction:
The left is responsible for 9/11 in the following ways. First, the cultural left has fostered a decadent American culture that angers and repulses traditional societies, especially those in the Islamic world that are being overwhelmed with this culture. In addition, the left is waging an aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family and to promote secular values in non-Western cultures. This campaign has provoked a violent reaction from Muslims who believe that their most cherished beliefs and institutions are under assault. Further, the cultural left has routinely affirmed the most vicious prejudices about American foreign policy held by radical factions in the Muslim world, and then it has emboldened those factions to attack the United States with the firm conviction that “America deserves it” and that they can do with relative impunity. Absent those conditions, Osama bin Laden would never have launched the 9/11 attacks, nor would the United States today be the target of Islamic radicals throughout the world. Thus when leading figures on the left say, “We made them do this to us,” in a sense they are correct. They are not correct that America is to blame. But their statement is true in that their actions and their America are responsible for fostering Islamic anti-Americanism in general and 9/11 in particular.
Gingrich’s spokespeople declined to comment, when asked whether he has any comment on D’Souza’s prior thesis about the cultural left being responsible for provoking 9/11.
