Why "Islamofascism" is a bad term

I agree with Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen about "Islamofascism" (though Damian may not), if fascism is to retain any shred of substantive meaning. However I think Mr Gardner underestimates the long-term existential (and demographic--see Mark Steyn) threat. Remember that a great Muslim oak from little Arabian acorns grew.

At least since the days of Oswald Mosley and the Spanish Civil War, "fascist" has been the preferred slur of campus revolutionaries and other leftists of limited vocabulary. But something curious has happened in the last few years.

Among conservatives, "Islamofascist" has become the standard label for those who butcher in the name of Allah. Practically unknown prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, the term was first embraced in the nether regions of the blogosphere before it seeped into the mainstream. President George W. Bush used it only once, in 2006, but Rudy Giuliani, the Republican with the best shot at succeeding Bush, has made it a crowd-pleasing fixture of his stump speech.

[...]

This is all quite appalling for liberals and leftists. The end of the political spectrum that once saw a fascist under every crew cut now finds the right's use of its favourite epithet offensive, even bigoted.

Nonsense, huffed Christopher Hitchens in Slate. Both fascism and violent Islamism, Hitchens wrote, "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." And on it goes, with Hitchens generating a long list of shared characteristics and concluding that if it goose-steps like a fascist, it is a fascist, and should be called what it is.

As usual with Hitchens, his case is clever, compelling and far more substantial than similar efforts of much lesser writers. It is also wrong.

"This is a very dubious term because all radical movements have things in common but they're not the same thing," says Stanley Payne, a leading scholar and author of Fascism: Comparison and Definition. "Fascism and communism have an awful lot in common but communists weren't fascists and it's not helpful to call communists fascist."

A list of the differences between fascism and violent Islamism is as easy to produce as a list of the similarities, Payne notes. Fascism was ultra-nationalistic but Islamism rejects nationalism. Fascism was secular, not religious. Fascism deployed state violence and warfare, not terrorism. And so on.

Payne also worries that "Islamofascism" could be counter-productive, even dangerous. "One of the most important things is to separate the great majority of Muslims who are peaceful from the terrorists, so you have to use terminology that defines and specifies the terrorists and doesn't sound like a broad-brush painting of Muslims in general," he says. Gluing "Islam" and "fascism" together "makes it sound as if Islam in general is fascist." That's no way to win hearts and minds.

More after the jump.

Mark C.

[...]

In this sense, the "Islamofascist" label is part of a larger trend. Ever since 9/11, many writers, commentators and politicians have cast the terrorist threat in ever-grander terms - culminating in the self-evidently absurd notion that small bands of lightly armed fanatics are, like the Red Army and the Wehrmacht before them, a threat to the every existence of civilization. This process is driven, in part, by psychology.

[...]

Inflate terrorism and it ceases to be a mere problem, threat or danger. It is an existential crisis - and the fight against it becomes an existential mission. "What I dread now," wrote George Packer in the New York Times, "is a return to the normality we are all supposed to seek."

Fascists do have their uses.

Posted by markc at October 28, 2007 02:44 PM