Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Islamic Fascism

September 11, 2006It’s Fascism — and It's Islamicby Victor Davis HansonTribune Media Services

George Bush recently declared that we are at war with "Islamic fascism." Muslim-American groups were quick to express furor at the expression. Middle Eastern autocracies complained that it was provocative and insensitive.

Critics of the term chosen by the president, however, should remember what al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas and other extremist Muslim groups have said and done. Like the fascists of the 1930s, the leaders of these groups are authoritarians who brook no dissent in their efforts to impose a comprehensive system of submission upon the unwilling.

Osama bin Laden urged Muslims to kill any American they could find, and then tried to fulfill that vow on Sept. 11. Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah bragged that "the Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them" — and then started a war. Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, promises to "wipe out" Israel, and is seeking the nuclear means to do so.Sharia law and dreams of pan-Islamic global rule fuel their ambitions. Once again, they seek to fool Western liberals through voicing a litany of perpetual hurts. Like the Nazis who whined about the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I, and alleged maltreatment of Germans in the Sudetenland, for years Islamists harped about American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, the U.N. embargo of Iraq and the occupation of Gaza and Lebanon.

But when each complaint was settled, another louder one sprung up; these grievances, it turned out, were pretexts for a larger sense of victimhood, jealousy and lost pride. And appeasement — treating the first World Trade Center bombing as a mere criminal justice matter or virtually ignoring the attack on the USS Cole — only spurred on further aggression.

Islamic fascism is also anti-democratic and characteristically reactionary. It conjures up a past of Islamic influence that existed before the supposed corruption of modernism. Like Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, who sought to recapture lost mythical Aryan, Roman or samurai purity, so Islamic fascists talk in romantic terms of the ancient caliphate.

Anti-Semitism is a tenet of fascism, then and now. But so is a generic hatred for unbelievers, homosexuals and blacks. The latter are slurred in the Arab media, while homosexuals were rounded up under the Taliban and the Iranian mullacracy.

"Mein Kampf" sells well under its translated title "Jihadi." President Ahmadinejad recently suggested in a sympathetic letter to the German chancellor that the Holocaust was little more than an "alibi" used by the victors of World War II to keep the defeated down.

Even now, it is hard to distinguish the slurs against Jews ("pigs and apes") used in the Middle Eastern media from the venom of Joseph Goebbels' propaganda. Goose-stepping and stiff-armed salutes at Iranian and Hezbollah parades are conscious imitations of past fascist armies.

Some object that the term "Islamic fascism" is too vague to encompass the differing agendas of diverse groups such as the Wahhabis, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. But just as racist German Nazis found common ground with Asian supremacists in Japan, so too the shared hatred of the West trumps the internecine rivalries of present-day Islamists.

The common denominators are extremist views of the Koran (thus the term Islamic), and the goal of seeing authoritarianism imposed at the state level by force (thus the notion of fascism). The pairing of the two words conveys a precise message: the old fascism is back, but now driven by a radical fundamentalist creed of Islam.

Others object that fascism conjures up images of past huge armies, and thus exaggerates only a moderate threat from today's ragtag jihadists. But Iran is seeking a bomb far more powerful than anything Hitler had at his disposal. About 2,400 Nazi V-1 buzz bombs in World War II reached their London targets. Nearly 4,000 Katyushas hit tiny Israel in about a month. And the petroleum of the Middle East is the lever by which the Islamic fascists hope to overturn an oil-hungry world.

In contrast, the fuzzy "war on terror" is the real inexact usage. The United States has never fought against an enemy's tools — such as German submarines or the Soviet KGB — but only against those who employ them. Other groups today use terror — like narco-dealers and Basque separatists — but this war at this time is not against them.

The real problem is not that "Islamic fascism" is inaccurate or mean-spirited, but that this identification earns such vehement disdain in Europe and the United States. That hysteria may tell us as much about the state of a demoralized West as the term itself does about our increasingly emboldened enemies.
©2006 Tribune Media Services


thank you Mike H for this little tidbit. See the blog is very active so active I have a time to keep up! ^..^

5 comments:

Indigo Red said...

I've wondered why Blacks often move toward Islam. In Arabic, the language of the god, "African" is literally translated to "slave". That is how highly Africans and Blacks are viewed.

Hanson has addressed the issue of what to call this war before. He, along with everyone else, struggles with it. Many think what we call it is immaterial, but words have meaning beyond the dictionary. An agreeable term has not come about yet. The term that is settled upon will be organic, evolving from simple conversation after which we will all just use that term without any debate.

"War on Terror", "War on Terrorism", "War on Islamofascism" are all clumsy. The object of all are ideas and one does not wage a shooting war against ideas. One wages war against people. Islamofascism, an accuracy to Western thinking, does not describe for the rest of the world what it is that is being resisted. Surely there must be root words in Arabic that can be combined with Latin, Greek, or Germanic roots to create a new word for the new kind of war we must wage.

Just as naming a newborn baby is not easy, naming newborn wars isn't easy either. Let's just call it "BOB" and get on with it.

dcat said...

What is wrong with John Chris or Steve?

Indigo Red said...

Or Bobby, so that it is non-sexist.

dcat said...

Yeah well let's insult them even more with barbie and ken.

Mike H. said...

Oh no, we cannot stomach that infidel, your days are numbered infidel barbie collector. We will hang your Ken from the top of the Holy Radio Tower from whence the Holy voices speak. The voices say that you will be burkaed up, can you not hear them infidel? They are as plain as day how can you say that you don't hear them? they are telling me that I should get my AK-47 and kill all the sheep (um, I didn't quite hear where the sheeps were but I will kill them) or a reasonable facsimile of them whichever is good enough for government work. You should be cairful infidel.