Islamo-fascism = Discover the Networks

from the excellent,, Discover the Network,,

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=183&type=issue

Islamo-fascism

The use of the term “Islamo-fascism” to describe the doctrines and objectives of radical Islam has raised the ire of many leftists and Muslims. They regard acts of Islamic terror and jihad not as compliance with Muslim doctrines that encourage aggression against "infidels," but rather as a battered culture's unfortunate but legitimate responses to the presumably provocative injustices of the West. They depict America's war on Islamic terror as an illegitimate, racist enterprise that unfairly smears all members of a largely peaceful and tolerant faith. And, denying that Islamo-fascism even exists -- let alone that it poses a genuine threat to America and the West -- they dismiss anyone who calls attention to such a threat as a “racist” or an “Islamophobe.” As Islam scholar Robert Spencer observes, they generally display "no recognition whatsoever that any Muslims might have done anything that might have given rise to 'Islamophobia,' or that Muslims worldwide have any ability or responsibility to do anything to stop jihad violence and Islamic supremacism."

In August 2006, The Nation and Alternet each ran an article claiming that the term "Islamo-fascism" is invalid and meaningless. Said the piece:

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. . . .

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. . . . "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. . . . "Islamo-fascism" enrages to no purpose the dwindling number of Muslims who don't already hate us.

In October 2007 The Nation quoted Barnard College religion professor Elizabeth Castelli, who called "Islamofascism" a "made-up term" designed to "close off debate, impose a particular position and set of arguments, and invite the harassment of individuals who hold alternative positions." "It casts the world situation in a clash-of-civilizations mode," added Castelli, "and places any critic in the position of being anti-Western, or even treasonous."

That same month, a host of leftist organizations condemned the Terrorism Awareness Project’s “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” (IFAW) as an exercise in religious bigotry and hatred, rather than as an educational endeavor seeking to inform Americans about the nature of the enemy that has declared war on them.

The Huffington Post, for instance, published a column titled “Laughing at Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” This piece characterized IFAW's organizers as right-wing "crusaders" who were "seeking to purposefully trap and target Muslim student groups at various universities." Stating that IFAW's purpose was "not about awareness at all, but using anti-Muslim animus to achieve political ends," the author claimed that the week's "primary political end is to continue the war in Iraq."

Also in October 2007, a Daily Kos post stated: "Of course, while there may be Islamic radicals that promote theocracy, 'Islamic Fascism' is a misnomer. In fact, the only case I know of in the world right now where that [sic] a religious group can truly be claimed to be promoting fascism is the American religious right's forming bedfellows with the corporate fascists if the corprotists [sic] will let them have their own far-right 'Christian' theocracy."

CounterPunch writer Alexander Cockburn called Islamo-fascism "a gloriously vague term" concocted by right-wing "Islamophobe[s]" who, during the October 2007 IFAW, "descended on various college campuses to be received by Christian-Fascists and the curious while they hurled imprecations at the left for being soft on sons of the Prophet stoning women to death for adultery."

Gary Leupp, meanwhile, wrote in CounterPunch that IFAW was the brainchild of "a collection of far-right ideologues" engaged in "a calculated effort to vilify Islam in general, place Muslim Student Associations on the defensive, and generate support for further U.S. military action in the Islamic world."

CommonDreams also joined the chorus of publications deriding the very notion that Islamo-fascism even exists, reprinting a Nation article by Barbara Ehrenreich which declared that IFAW consisted of "a veritable witches’ brew of Cheney-style anti-jihadism mixed in with old-fashioned, right-wing anti-feminism and a sour dash of anti-Semitism." Another Common Dreams piece placed the term "Islamo-fascism" in sneer quotes, to convey its illegitimacy.

This section of DiscoverTheNetworks postulates that "Islamo-fascism" is both a valid term and a legitimate topic for intellectual discussion. In the post-9/11 era, the West has been forced to confront the undeniably widespread existence of a radical Islamic movement that seeks to expand its dominion over all the nations of the earth, and ultimately to establish on a worldwide scale a caliphate, or kingdom, governed by strict adherence to Islamic law. The means by which this brand of Islam aims to achieve its expansionist goals is jihad, or holy war, a longstanding Muslim tradition rooted in violence and the subjugation or murder of infidels.

The term “Islamo-fascism” made its first entry into the English language in September 1990, when the Scottish historian Malise Ruthven, writing in Britain’s Independent newspaper, described how traditional Arab dictatorships used religious appeals in order to maintain their iron grip on political power.

In this section of DiscoverTheNetworks, the category titled Defining Islamo-fascism” contains vital resources explaining the term and indicating why it is both legitimate and accurate. One noteoworthy article by Christopher Hitchens draws numerous parallels between radical Islam and the fascism that was introduced to the world by the likes of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis:

Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. … Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia … Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts, the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.

A basic tenet of German fascism was the notion of a master race and its superiority to all others. The Islamo-fascist variant of this is what Hitchens calls the concept of “the ‘pure’ and the ‘exclusive’ over the unclean and the kufar or profane.”

Another crucial article (by historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson) in the Defining Islamo-fascism category buttresses Hitchens’ observations. Writes Hanson:

"Islamic fascism" [is] the perfect nomenclature for the agenda of radical Islam, for a variety of historical and scholarly reasons. . . . First, the general idea of "fascism"—the creation of a centralized authoritarian state to enforce blanket obedience to a reactionary, all-encompassing ideology—fits well the aims of contemporary Islamism that openly demands implementation of sharia law and the return to a Pan-Islamic and theocratic caliphate. In addition, Islamists, as is true of all fascists, privilege their own particular creed of true believers by harkening back to a lost, pristine past, in which the devout were once uncorrupted by modernism. . . . Because fascism is born out of insecurity and the sense of failure, hatred for Jews is de rigueur. To read al Qaeda’s texts is to reenter the world of Mein Kampf (naturally now known as jihadi in the Arab world). . . . Envy and false grievance, as in the past with Italian, German, or Japanese whining, are always imprinted deeply within the fascist mind. . . . Second, fascism thrives best in a once proud, recently humbled, but now ascendant, people. They are ripe to be deluded into thinking contemporary setbacks were caused by others and are soon to be erased through ever more zealotry.

The category titled Islamic Genocide Plan reveals the homicidal intentions of Islamo-fascists, as told in their own words.

The category titled Jihad's Nazi Connections demostrates the undeniable, historical links between radical Islam and fascism. As David Meir-Levi explains in one of the articles: “The Muslim groups which today threaten the West with terrorism, subversion and insurgency, and which, in their own words, seek to bring about a global totalitarian empire are not only fascist in the broad sociological sense, but can trace their literal historical origins to Nazism and its genocidal ambitions.”

The category titled Islamo-fascist Organizations provides profiles of numerous groups whose objectives are consistent with the jihadist goals of Islamo-fascism. Those goals include the implementation of Sharia (Islamic Law) in the U.S. and other non-Muslim countries; the establishment of Islam as the supreme faith worldwide; the reestablishment of the caliphate; and the destruction of Israel.

The category titled Fellow-Traveling Organizations provides profiles of groups that sympathize with one or more Islamist/jihadist objectives, but do not openly identify themselves as Islamists or jihadists.

The category titled Apologists for the Islamo-Fascists provides profiles of organizations that, while they do not share goals of the Islamist/jihadist groups, nonetheless lend considerable support to the Islamo-fascists and their “fellow-travelers.” For example, these apologist groups strive -- in the name of “civil liberties” -- to obstruct the anti-terrorism efforts of law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. In the name of “human rights,” they fight aggressively to protect suspected terrorists from detection, capture, and prosecution. And in the name of “social justice,” they demand that Muslims, who they characterize as a group allegedly “victimized” by widespread discrimination and violence, should receive special protections and privileges to counterbalance the ravages of a society that allegedly hates Muslims. Denying that Islamo-fascism even exists -- let alone that it poses a genuine threat to America and the West -- these apologist groups dismiss anyone who calls attention to that threat as a “racist” or an “Islamophobe.”

The category titled "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" summarizes the October 2007 campaign, organized by the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Terrorism Awareness Project, to educate college students about who the enemy is -- not “terror,” but a fanatical religious movement whose goal is the creation of a global Muslim empire ruled by an Islamic caliphate, to be based in Iraq, once America is defeated.

The category titled Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week II summarizes the follow-up campaign, which took place in April 2008.

The category titled Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week III summarizes the third campaign, which took place in October 2008.