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[R. S. Refugee]

I could be more blunt in my accessment of the intelligence level (negative numbers?) of people who use such ridiculous terms as 'Islamofacists', but then I'm afraid my old sparing partner, Bulsajo, wouldn't like my headline writing and wouldn't read the article and then where would I be?

And, of course, I could be wrong. After all, our Dear Leader used the term recently and we all know he's something of an intellectual icon. Right?
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Katha Pollitt:
'The trouble with Bush's 'Islamofascism''

If you thought the War on Terror was bad, get ready for the international disasters that the "war on Islamic fascism" will produce.


If you control the language, you control the debate. As the Bush Administration's Middle Eastern policy sinks ever deeper into bloody incoherence, the "war on terror" has been getting a quiet linguistic makeover. It's becoming the "war on Islamic fascism." The term has been around for a while -- Nexis takes it back to 1990, when the writer and historian Malise Ruthven used "Islamo-fascism" in the London Independent to describe the authoritarian governments of the Muslim world; after 9/11 it was picked up by neocons and prowar pundits, including Stephen Schwartz in the Spectator and Christopher Hitchens in this magazine, to describe a broad swath of Muslim bad guys from Osama to the mullahs of Iran.

But the term moved into the mainstream this August when Bush referred to the recently thwarted Britain-based suicide attack plot on airplanes as "a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists." Joe Lieberman compares Iraq to "the Spanish Civil War, which was the harbinger of what was to come." The move away from "war on terrorism" arrives not a moment too soon for language fussbudgets who had problems with the idea of making war on a tactic. To say nothing of those who wondered why, if terrorism was the problem, invading Iraq was the solution. (From the President's August 21 press conference: Q: "But what did Iraq have to do with September 11?" A: "Nothing." Now he tells us!)



What's wrong with "Islamo-fascism"? For starters, it's a terrible historical analogy. Italian Fascism, German Nazism and other European fascist movements of the 1920s and '30s were nationalist and secular, closely allied with international capital and aimed at creating powerful, up-to-date, all-encompassing states. Some of the trappings might have been anti-modernist -- Mussolini looked back to ancient Rome, the Nazis were fascinated by Nordic mythology and other Wagnerian folderol -- but the basic thrust was modern, bureaucratic and rational. You wouldn't find a fascist leader consulting the Bible to figure out how to organize the banking system or the penal code or the women's fashion industry. Even its anti-Semitism was "scientific": The problem was the Jews' genetic inferiority and otherness, which countless biologists, anthropologists and medical researchers were called upon to prove -- not that the Jews killed Christ and refused to accept the true faith.

Call me pedantic, but if only to remind us that the worst barbarities of the modern era were committed by the most modern people, I think it is worth preserving "fascism" as a term with specific historical content.

Second, and more important, "Islamo-fascism" conflates a wide variety of disparate states, movements and organizations as if, like the fascists, they all want similar things and are working together to achieve them. Neocons have called Saddam Hussein and the Baathists of Syria Islamo-fascists, but these relatively secular nationalist tyrants have nothing in common with shadowy, stateless, fundamentalist Al Qaeda -- as even Bush now acknowledges -- or with the Taliban, who want to return Afghanistan to the seventh century; and the Taliban aren't much like Iran, which is different from (and somewhat less repressive than) Saudi Arabia -- whoops, our big ally in the Middle East! Who are the "Islamo-fascists" in Saudi Arabia -- the current regime or its religious-fanatical opponents? It was under the actually existing US-supported government that female students were forced back into their burning school rather than be allowed to escape unveiled. Under that government people are lashed and beheaded, women can't vote or drive, non-Muslim worship is forbidden, a religious dress code is enforced by the state through violence and Wahhabism -- the "Islamo-fascist" denomination--is exported around the globe.

"Islamo-fascism" looks like an analytic term, but really it's an emotional one, intended to get us to think less and fear more. It presents the bewildering politics of the Muslim world as a simple matter of Us versus Them, with war to the end the only answer, as with Hitler. If you doubt that every other British Muslim under the age of 30 is ready to blow himself up for Allah, or that shredding the Constitution is the way to protect ourselves from suicide bombers, if you think that Hamas might be less popular if Palestinians were less miserable, you get cast as Neville Chamberlain, while Bush plays FDR. "Islamo-fascism" rescues the neocons from harsh verdicts on the invasion of Iraq ("cakewalk... roses... sweetmeats... Chalabi") by reframing that ongoing debacle as a minor chapter in a much larger story of evil madmen who want to fly the green flag of Islam over the capitals of the West. Suddenly it's just a detail that Saddam wasn't connected with 9/11, had no WMDs, was not poised to attack the United States or Israel -- he hated freedom, and that was enough. It doesn't matter, either, that Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites seem less interested in uniting the umma than in murdering one another. With luck we'll be so scared we won't ask why anyone should listen to another word from people who were spectacularly wrong about the biggest politico-military initiative of the past thirty years, and their balding heads will continue to glow on our TV screens for many nights to come. On to Tehran!

It remains to be seen if "Islamo-fascism" will win back the socially liberal "security moms" who voted for Bush in 2004 but have recently been moving toward the Democrats. But the word is already getting a big reaction in the Muslim world. As I write the New York Times is carrying a full page "open letter" to Bush from the Al Kharafi Group, the mammoth Kuwaiti construction company, featuring photos of dead and wounded Lebanese civilians. "We think there is a misunderstanding in determining: "'Who deserves to be accused of being a fascist'!!!!"

"Islamo-fascism" enrages to no purpose the dwindling number of Muslims who don't already hate us. At the same time, it clouds with ideology a range of situations -- Lebanon, Palestine, airplane and subway bombings, Afghanistan, Iraq -- we need to see clearly and distinctly and deal with in a focused way. No wonder the people who brought us the disaster in Iraq are so fond of it.

Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation.

http://alternet.org/waroniraq/40850/

[daskalos]

[R. S. Refugee]

[daskalos]

Withdrawal noted and seconded. And I just aced several segments of a practice TOEIC.

And, withdrawal notwithstanding, Katha Pollit wrote that article, not Kate, but I guess your panties were in too much a twist to notice something like the writer's name. And in this case, if you wish to call me a pedant, you may also call me verifiably right.

[R. S. Refugee]

[beck's]

I don't think the anology between Islamic fascists and the Nazi variety is so terrible because:

1. Both varieties are virulently anti-semetic. The Nazis waged war to kill Jews. The deportation of the Hungarian Jews to the death camps is a case in point. They engineered this deportation when they knew they would lose the war. The Hungarian deportations were just before D Day. Also, trains bringing war supplies to the eastern front were put on sidings to give the Jewish transports priority. In a similar way the Islamic fascists are irrationally anti-semetic. Kill the Jews is a constant theme in their discourse.

2. Both varieties are irrational. The Islamic fascists are religious fanatics. Suicide bombers who believe they will get 72 virgins when they become martyrs are not thinking rationally. The Nazis were also irrational, believing in the myth of blood and soil and in the idea of the master race. These beliefs had no basis in rational thought. They rejected both the rationality of capitalism and that of communism.

3. Both varieties are imperialistic. The Nazis wanted to create an empire in the middle of Europe and had plans to eventually conquer North America and Africa. The Islamic fascists want to create a theocratic caliphate spanning the globe.

4. Both varieties practice censorship. The Nazis need no examples. The recent mass violence and intimidation practiced against the Danish cartoonists and their editiors who lampooned Islam provides a case in point.

[deadman]

[Bulsajo]

[daskalos]

[daskalos]

[Kuros]

There's a very good reason that some extremists are called Islamofascists. Islamofascists, also known as Islamists, are distinct from Muslims or regular adherents of Islam insofar as they are socially active in promoting an ideology that is as much political as religious in nature.

For the historical connections between the Muslim Brotherhood (Al Ikhwan Al Muslimun) and the Nazis, and the subsequent influence the Muslim Brotherhood on Al-Zawahiri, I suggest reading ATol's special Islamism, Fascism, and Terrorism by Mark Erikson. There are not even six degrees of seperation between Al Qaeda and Hitler, and the ideologies are frankly rather intertwined, although one could arguably suggest that Hitler's threat to the world was greater than all the Islamist forces in existence today are.

Here is a selection:

[sundubuman]

I could be more blunt in my accessment of the intelligence level (negative numbers?) of people who use such ridiculous terms as 'Islamofacists', but then I'm afraid my old sparing partner, Bulsajo, wouldn't like my headline writing and wouldn't read the article and then where would I be?

And, of course, I could be wrong. After all, our Dear Leader used the term recently and we all know he's something of an intellectual icon. Right?
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spell like that and your toeic score wouldn't be much better.

[R. S. Refugee]

[sundubuman]

although on second thought, you may have discovered a useful new word, inadvertently of course.


The new school has plenty of accessment.

Easy access and easily accessed may have a competitor.

[chotaerang]

Are you equally offended when the United States or Israel are described as facist?