Mark, as your last paragraph implicitly recognizes, for you to say that Dinesh D’Souza’s argument that “America’s worthless porno-sodomite-lapdance culture is the root cause of jihad has one very big hole in it” is to be very, very kind indeed. Only “one very big hole”? Good grief. While I have little doubt that our (splendidly) hedonistic ways have contributed *something* to jihadist rage, any suggestion that they are the “root cause” of our current problems with extremist Islam is simply absurd. To take just one example, Mr. D’Souza should take a look at God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and The Hidden Root of Modern Jihad by Charles Allen, a first-rate historian of British India. It’s an excellent account of the widespread Wahhabist trouble-making in the 19th Century Raj, a time, I believe, somewhat before the lapdance era that he so bemoans.

The fact of the matter is that there is something in human nature that is drawn to violent religious fanaticism of the worst kind (usually bundled up in a grotesque puritanism). It’s not just the Wahhabis. No religion (or quasi-religion such as communism) is immune from it. Think, for example, of the Maccabees, or the completely-to-be-expected Spanish Inquisition, or, for that matter, the zealots of the early Bolshevik era, or even, dare I say it, the foam-flecked atheism of Richard Dawkins. The more interesting question is whether some religions are more prone to it than others…