Deconstructing Dinesh D'Souza

Politically speaking, writer Dinesh D'Souza has been Rogue for years. But he seems to be veering off the ranch according to reactions to his September 9th Forbes cover story, which among other things, posits the strange theory that President Obama's domestic policies and foreign policy strategy are shaped by what D'Souza describes as Obama's father's "hatred of the colonial system."

Apparently undaunted by the fact that Obama's own book "Dreams of My Father" makes clear the President was left rather disappointed with the man his father became, or that he was absent through most of his formative upbringing, D'Souza delights prominent conservative media pundits and thinkers by dangling proof that Obama is secretly some kind of foreign radical.

MediaMatters.org has completely dissected the text from the D'Souza piece and clearly identified at least ten claims from the article which are either completely false or stand in total opposition to established facts. Like Fox News Channel president Roger Ailes rushing to defend the tactless televised ramblings of Glenn Beck, Forbes stands firmly by D'Souza's error-ridden article.

Is Forbes magazine Going Rouge? The magazine wasn't always so flippant with facts. My father, a college-educated African-American raised in North Carolina during the Great Depression who went on to become a successful corporate professional and political conservative always had Forbes in his den when I was growing up. He was a long-time subscriber and considered it essential reading.

What's peculiar about D'Souza's cover story is that the Forbes brand, while certainly a bastion of the conservative, pro-capitalist economic mindset, seems to have taken a sharp right turn from the standards set by it's founder Malcom Forbes.

In the article D'Souza repeatedly combines his un-evolved conservative slant with a bizarre mix of his own brand of dime-store psychoanalysis and a rather klutzy distortion of the truth in an effort to provide some sort of intellectually substantive justification for Tea Party anger. It's like he tried to whip up some fodder for conservative pundits to use in the weeks leading up to the November election and no one at Forbes even bothered to fact check it.

D'Souza's conclusions from Obama's book "Dreams of My Father" have puzzled a number of journalists who have reported on the books factual errors.

As MediaMatters.org reports, "Everyone else" who read Dreams "saw Obama burning with disappointment in Barack Sr. In a September 13th review of D'Souza's forthcoming book, Slate.com's David Weigel wrote, "While everyone else read Dreams From My Father and saw Obama burning with disappointment in Barack Sr., D'Souza sees a man burning with 'hatred derived from the debris of the anti-colonial wars.'"

Media Matters also reports that Ryan Chittum described D'Souza's new book as "a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia." in the September 13th issue of the Columbia Journalism Review

But anyone remotely familiar with Dinesh D'Souza's writings and background can hardly be surprised that he's written an error-laden piece trashing the President.

D'Souza's simplistic antiquated observations of African-American culture have long pegged him as being right up there with Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin in terms of conservative media superstars long on wind and short on intellectual substance.

In D'Souza's book The End of Racism, he demonstrated an alarmingly uninformed grasp of American history by making the claim that the "American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well."

He wrote a book blaming liberals for the 911 attacks.

But who is he really?

D'Souza is an immigrant from Mumbai, Matashra, India who arrived in the United States in 1978.

Raised in conservative Arizona, according to a 2007 Boston Globe article by Peter Canellos, D'Souza first grabbed headlines as a 20 year-old writer and Reagan disciple who publicly outed members of the Dartmouth Gay Student Alliance in an article for Dartmouth University's Dartmouth Review - D'Souza also honed his writing by attacking Dartmouth's affirmative action policies.

According to the Globe article, "During the 1980s, before and after D'Souza's editorship, the paper was repeatedly in the news for controversies that included taping a Gay Student Alliance meeting, publishing a column in a mocking imitation of black English, ridiculing a class by a black music professor, comparing the university's Jewish president to Adolf Hitler, and falsely asserting that a university chaplain had defended a group advocating sex with adolescents."

I don't know him personally but perhaps D'Souza's ingrained biases are fueled by his conversion to evangelical Christianity? Like Ann Coulter, D'Souza's contempt for non-white, non-Christians is always cloaked in a veneer of intellectualism and so extreme in tone that it suggests that like some immigrants from India, he was quick to adopt the worn cloak of American bigotry and prejudice based on the mental indoctrination of the Indian caste system he was exposed to as a child. Some Indians, certainly not all, come to this country and quickly adopt an open contempt for those they regard as beneath them.

I've explored Indian racism towards African-Americans previously in this blog, but D'Souza genuinely puzzles me. Why was he so quick to adopt such clearly racist views on blacks?

Was he simply eager to demonstrate just how "cultured" he is by adopting negative views of homosexuals and minorities - almost as if to separate himself psychologically from the dark tone of his own skin and his Indian origins.

It's possible he has a need to distinguish himself from those he considers lower on the mental cast system he's formed inside his mind, which is his right to do.

But I'm not sure that excuses bad journalism and sloppy writing - which is exactly what his Forbes cover story is.

Europe's Roma Dilemma

For hundreds of years populations of Roma, more familiar to many as Gypsies, have wandered various European cities like a forgotten nomadic people without a country or a homeland.

Their sad plight, which began in medieval India, has recently become a lightening rod for media scrutiny of the broader immigration policies of the member countries of the European Union, most noticeably France, who deported more than 1,000 Roma immigrants in a one-month period during August and September.

The BBC reports that the recent expulsion of large numbers of Roma populations from France has divided the members of President Nicolas Sarkozy's own cabinet and pushed the already embattled leader of France to defend his policy both to his own government and to other members of the European Union vigorously opposed to the French policy of deportation.

The French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, "said he has almost resigned over the issue" according to a small blurb in 'The World this Week' section of the September 4th issue of the Economist - which also reported that a gunman in the Slovak capital of Bratislava intentionally shot and killed six members of a Roma family inside their apartment in late August.

Various human rights groups have accused the French government of intentional discrimination against impoverished Roma immigrants based on a leaked memo sent from the Interior Ministry to regional police chiefs that specifically outlines a systematic policy of closing Roma encampments and settlements in France and expelling the people from the country.

Their peculiar status sadly parallels the plight of newly emancipated African-American slaves in the south after the Civil War, or Jews fleeing Europe after World War II; and Palestinians today.

For many Americans the image of the people known commonly as "Gypsies" has been formed largely from a simplistic romanticized stereotype crafted by Hollywood.

At the core of this distorted misrepresentation are a people trapped by their own identity according to an interesting piece by Suzanne Daley in the September 16th New York Times.

The all too common image of the violin being played by a mysterious dark-skinned man with a dashing head scarf tied around his head. Or the sultry bandanna-wearing Gypsy woman/sage figure reading the future through crystal balls in the back of colorful wagons at carnivals looms in the subconscious minds of many Americans who don't really understand the history and origins of the Romani.

As is often the case the media-created image is far different than reality for the impoverished, under-educated marginalized pockets of Roma people stretching from Western Europe to the borders of the middle-east.

For the more prosperous countries of the European Union struggling to manage their way out of the global recession, (each of which harbors thousands of migrant Roma populations within their borders) it begs the question of how an often-vilified and certainly ostracized population of people will survive in a Europe that seems to regard them as a problem no one wants to deal with, and no one owns.