Danger lurks in use of term 'Islamofascism'

[Marcus Marulus]

Danger lurks in use of term 'Islamofascism'

Thursday, November 08, 2007

If language is a window on the world, a deliberate smudging of that window will make it harder to see the world clearly and comprehend it. So it is with the highly ideological term "Islamofascist,'' a label that is being wielded as a blunt weapon in a left-right debate and has been carelessly bandied about by some presidential candidates.

Recently, the former leftist turned rightist David Horowitz promoted something called "Islamofascism Awareness Week'' on college campuses. The implication was that the academic left has so lost its bearings that it can no longer recognize its historic enemy, the old fascist wolf, under that beast's new disguise. Another apparent aim was to discredit scholars who insist on making careful distinctions among the various movements and ideologies that are grouped under the rubric of political Islam.

Transparent as the intentions of Horowitz may be, the Republican candidates' use of "Islamofascism'' is cruder still, and may cause considerably more harm. Just before he dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas spoke of a threat from Islamofascism during a visit to the Boston Globe. Rudy Giuliani - whose foreign policy adviser, Norman Podhoretz, just published a book touting World War IV against Islamofascism - commonly derides the Democrats because they "couldn't even utter the word 'Islamic terrorism.''' And former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, while using the less obfuscatory term "radical Islamic jihadists,'' has been striving to keep up with his competition by putting out a television ad titled "Jihad'' and invoking what he calls "a military threat unlike anything we've known before.''

The next American president will need to have a lucid understanding of the threats facing this country. One of those threats undeniably comes from al-Qaida and like-minded groups. But the bands that swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden must be seen for what they are: stateless fanatics with a purist nostalgia for a seventh-century political and social order. Their primary goal is to overthrow regimes in the Muslim world they disdain as insufficiently Islamic.

Al-Qaida and company cannot be compared with the fascist powers ruled by Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco - neither for their ideas nor for their military power. The Nazis scorned religion, wanting to make the state the sole object of worship. Bin Laden and Hitler might share a proclivity for cruelty and killing, but for little else. Hitler cherished the operas of Wagner; bin Laden and his Taliban allies have been known to put musicians to the lash for playing music at a wedding. And bin Laden has no panzer divisions.

The intellectually lazy analogy of Islamism to fascism has another unwelcome effect. It obscures the significant differences that exist among disparate governments, movements and terrorist networks in the Muslim world. If all Islamists are carelessly labeled Islamofascists, it becomes practically impossible to distinguish the democratic, free-market, pro-European governing party of Turkey from the Taliban; or either of those Sunni parties from the Lebanese Shi'ite movement Hezbollah; or those three from Palestinian Hamas; or those four from al-Qaida.

Americans have already paid a terrible price for a president's belated discovery that there were two sects of Muslims in Iraq: Sunni and Shi'ite. It is precisely because the security threats of the 21st century are so different from those of the last century that the next president must be free of tendentious simplifications such as Islamofascism.

Loose talk about Islamofascism or Islamic terrorism also carries noxious undertones. Such labels intimate that there is something inherently dangerous about all Muslims. And there is a subtext to those terms, an implication that the West faces an inevitable worldwide clash of religions and civilizations.

There need not be any such apocalyptic conflict. One way to prevent it is to give things their proper names - and not to allow the threat from bin Laden and similar fringe groups to be blown out of proportion by ideologues indulging in loose talk about a third or fourth World War.

The Boston Globe

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[Marcus Marulus]

Published on Monday, January 21, 2008 by The Boston Globe

Islamofascism’s Ill Political Wind

by James Carroll

The unfolding presidential elections are laying bare what the real dangers are in the new American condition. They come not from our political divisiveness, economic uncertainty or military insecurity - but from our religious character as a people, which, in this case, is not positive. Religious intolerance marks one candidate debate after another - a sweeping denigration of Islam. And it is going to backfire.

The code word “Islamofascism” has become a staple of rhetoric. It braces the talk not only of pundits, but of all the major Republican candidates - from the tough guy at one end, Rudy Giuliani, who lambastes Democrats for not using the word or its equivalent, to the “nice” candidate at the other end, Mike Huckabee, who defines Islamofascism as “the greatest threat this country [has] ever faced.”The pairing of “Islam” and “fascism” has no parallel in characterizations of extremisms tied to other religions, although the defining movements of fascism were linked to Catholicism - indirectly under Benito Mussolini in Italy, explicitly under Francisco Franco in Spain. Protestant and Catholic terrorists in Northern Ireland, both deserving the label “fascist,” never had their religions prefixed to that word. Nor have Hindu extremists in India, nor Buddhist extremists in Sri Lanka.

In contrast to the way militant zealotries of other religions have been perceived, there is a broad conviction, especially among many conservative American Christians, that the inner logic of Islam and fascism go together. Political candidates appeal to those Christians by defining the ambition of Islamofascists in language that makes prior threats from, say, Hitler or Stalin seem benign. The point is that there is a deep religious prejudice at work, and when politicians adopt its code, they make it worse.

The Democrats gain little by shaping their rhetoric to appeal to the Republicans’ conservative religious base, but a readiness to denigrate Islam shows up on their side, too. In last week’s debate, moderator Brian Williams put to Barack Obama a question about Internet rumors that claim he is a Muslim. The tone of the question suggested that Obama was being accused of something heinous. He replied with a simple affirmation that he is a Christian. He did not then ask, “And what would be wrong if I were a Muslim?” Had he done so, it seems clear, he would have cost himself votes in the present climate.

The present climate is my subject. In recent years, the public realm has been invaded by a certain kind of narrow Christian enthusiasm, made up partly of triumphalistic self-aggrandizement (exclusive salvation), and partly of the impulse to denigrate other religions, especially Islam. This phenomenon has been centered in, but not limited to, evangelical fundamentalism. The United States cannot have a constructive foreign policy in religiously enflamed regions like the Middle East, northern Africa or South Asia if the American presence in such conflicts is itself religiously enflaming.

Thus, how could the United States advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process if its government upholds, however implicitly, the Christian Zionist dream of a God-sponsored Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean? Where is the two-state solution then? How, for that matter, is the traditional American commitment to the Jewishness of Israel advanced if the Christian Zionist vision of ultimate Jewish conversion to Jesus is achieved?

The issue is larger. The intellectual and moral paralysis of all major candidates from both parties on the subject of the war in Iraq is mainly a result of their religion-sponsored imprisonment in the Islamofascism paradigm, whether they use the word or not. By emphasizing that the goal of Muslim terrorists is to wage what John McCain calls a “transcendent” war against “us,” candidates miss the most important fact about the conflicts in Iraq and throughout the Muslim world - that militant Muslim zealots are primarily at war with their own people, most of whom they regard as decadent apostates.

As Muslim scholar Reza Aslan observes, Osama bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Center was more aimed at generating a war of purification within the house of Islam than a war of conquest against “the far enemy” in the West. That strategy worked, sparking exactly the belligerent reaction he wanted, because America’s uninformed, religious prejudice toward Islam was predictable. What Bin Laden could not have imagined was that he would find like-minded partners-in-conflict coming to power in Washington, advancing his religious war, every bit as sure of God’s sponsorship as he.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company

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[Whiteruthenian]

Yeah! Why on earth are they trying to denigrate such a great word as “fascism” by combining it with “Islam”?!

[Marcus Marulus]

Originally Posted by Whiteruthenian

Yeah! Why on earth are they trying to denigrate such a great word as “fascism” by combining it with “Islam”?!

There is one neocon who holds positive view of Fascism or, at least, of what he deems as being representative of the essence of Fascism. It is Michael Ledeen.

Apart from that, Fascism is a code-word for anything "bad" in the modern political vocabulary.

[Routasydän]

I think its good that people can clearly see the purpose-orientated name-calling and labelling with terms such as "islamofascism". I can only hope that this would extend to terms used to demonize any European nationalist alternative.

Its all good that they are quick to rush to the defense of the radical Islamists, but what about European nationalists, identitarians and traditionalists, who have for decades had to carry the label of 'fascist', 'Neo-Nazi', etc.

[Marcus Marulus]

Originally Posted by wilpuri

I think its good that people can clearly see the purpose-orientated name-calling and labelling with terms such as "islamofascism". I can only hope that this would extend to terms used to demonize any European nationalist alternative.

Let us hope. Debunking catch-words of the official newspeak might prove useful as the first step in questioning the current system as a whole.

Originally Posted by wilpuri

Its all good that they are quick to rush to the defense of the radical Islamists, but what about European nationalists, identitarians and traditionalists, who have for decades had to carry the label of 'fascist', 'Neo-Nazi', etc.

Nationalist and identitarian intellectuals should work more assiduously on this task, it is my opinion. I think that Alain de Benoist has written something about the absurdities of such labels that have been put on European nationalists.