It's Fascism -- And It's Islamic :: Understanding Islam

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September 8, 2006

It's Fascism -- And It's Islamic

Topics: Understanding Islam

When George Bush recently declared that we are at war with "Islamic fascism," Muslim groups were quick to express furor at the expression. Middle Eastern autocracies complained that it was provocative and insensitive. But was it provocative and insensitive, or simply an accurate description of our real enemy?

As all but the sleepwalking liberal elites and their followers fail to recognize, and as Victor Davis Hanson writes at Real Clear Politics, 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:

Critics of the term chosen by the president, however, should remember what al-Qaida, 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.

Continue reading, "It's Fascism -- And It's Islamic".

Posted by Richard at September 8, 2006 9:57 AM

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