Posted on 10/01/2006 12:11:48 PM PDT by Braak
Making an easy comparison with the Nazis confuses our responses to terror, says religious historian Michael Burleigh Most people will have called someone a “fascist” in moments of anger, usually a young person arguing with an older conservative. For the term has never been confined to the ideologies and movements of interwar Europe that bore the name.
In recent months the use of “fascism” has migrated from left to right while spreading to the Islamic world. Tariq Ramadan, the Oxford-based Islamist ideologue, speaks of the (western) “fascism which kills innocent people in Iraq”. President George W Bush has announced that “this nation is at war with Islamic fascists”.
There are many understandable reasons why Bush is resorting to this language. “Fascism” enables the administration to give a familiar face to a shapeless enemy; it makes Al-Qaeda comprehensible on our terms by slipping a metaphorical Nazi steel helmet over the keffiyehs and balaclavas of the terrorists.
The legitimacy of fighting “fascism” is something that almost everyone can sign up to. But it begs the question as to whether militant Islam is “fascist”. Could one not equally refer to “Islamobolshevism”, since some of the main Islamist ideologues were fascinated by the idea of a revolutionary vanguard, even as they rejected Marxist atheism?
It is not hard to find direct links beyond the enthusiastic credulity of their respective adherents towards charismatic charlatans. There are also direct influences. One of Hitler’s greatest admirers was Grand Mufti Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini, an uncle of Yasser Arafat, who spent the war in Berlin urging the Führer to exterminate Jewish people. Ahmad Fardid, the Iranian philosopher, introduced the mystifying existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger to the young President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
I think we can do better by examining states of mind. Nothing much separates the horror that modern Islamists express towards western urban industrial society and the cultural pessimism that was pervasive on the European right in the late 19th century — the toxic pool from which fascism emerged in the aftermath of the great war.
Most European fascist movements were products of visceral national grievance; a colossal sense of collective victimhood at the hands of the Israeli David or the western Goliath is also a key motivating force behind radical Islam.
Interwar fascists believed in the purifying efficacy of political violence, glorified death and destruction and were contemptuous of liberal democracy and the rule of law. Radical Islamists may detest democracy for different reasons — as a form of blasphemy against Allah’s will rather than what elite fascists regarded as the politics of the mindless herd — but they share a similar nihilistic pleasure in chaos and destruction.
Like fascists and communists, they are psychologically captive to one big idea and are equally willing to kill, or to die, for it. Their big idea is that Muslims should be on top rather than so manifestly powerless vis-à-vis the western world.
Fascists believed in a politics of fall from a heavily mythologised paradisiacal past, casting themselves as the light that will dispel the darkness. “Germany awakes” is paralleled by the “blessed awakening” of all Muslims that tantalises Osama Bin Laden.
Like radical Islamists, fascists were fascinated by modern technology, albeit tank and tractor factories rather than satellite phones, but the visions of greatness that animated them lay in the remote past: ancient Rome in the case of Mussolini, or the medieval Reich which Hitler promised to restore a third time, although he was also fascinated by prehistoric Aryans. Al-Qaeda is similarly driven by a desire to recreate a caliphate that existed 1,300 years ago.
Before we, and Bush, get too carried away with “Islamofascism”, clearly there are huge contextual differences. Militant Islamists are utterly murderous and viciously anti-semitic, but the heterogeneous ethnic composition of Al-Qaeda hardly suggests that visions of racial purity matter to it. In fact, Al-Qaeda is doing its best to recruit white and black people in order to outwit authorities looking for Arabs and Pakistanis.
Fascism emerged as a form of “anti-politics” designed to bridge endemic conflicts between capital and labour. It favoured corporatist economics, in which employers and workers would be dragooned by the state. These doctrines have little bearing in economies of entrepreneurs and traders. Before his mafia-like Sudanese hosts stole his money in the late 1990s, Bin Laden was a (not very proficient) venture capitalist, ploughing his (modest) fortune into forlorn business endeavours to bankroll terrorism.
More insurmountably, the rise of radical Islam since the late 1970s reflects the bankruptcy of the two dominant political creeds in the Arab world, nationalism and socialism, the two western movements that comprised fascism.
nitially the ire of radical Islamists was directed against what they regarded as corrupt “apostate” rulers in Egypt, Jordan or Saudi Arabia rather than against the far enemy in the West. The war against Soviet Russia in Afghanistan expanded these horizons. Absurdly claiming credit for defeating communism, Bin Laden and his accomplices switched their attention to the West, and America in particular, once its armies (including female soldiers) were stationed to protect Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein. After fighting the Russians, defeating the effete Americans would not amount to much.
Perhaps the biggest problem with using 20th-century political concepts to describe Islamist militants is that they want to cause the collapse of the artificial nation states that were established by tribal dynasts, or imposed by imperialists in the 1920s, into a caliphate stretching from southern Spain to northwest China. Most fascists in the 1930s were extreme nationalists, not people who wanted to abolish the nation state in favour of some larger ethnically mixed empire.
Calling Islamist terrorists “Islamofascists” gets things only about half right, even when one reincorporates into “fascism” what it adapted from the Christian (and pagan) world view, rather than regarding it as a doctrine to defend the interests of the powerful.
Since Islamist terrorism is the product of a pathological strain within a particular religious tradition, it is best to stick with terms derived from it, notably “jihadism”. Although apologists aver that jihad is akin to yoga, in fact it means fighting in the alleged interests of the Muslim community or umma. The equivalent of Jesuit casuistry enables jihadist clerics to rationalise killing innocents by labelling them infidel.
Where does all this leave us with the long war, or in terms of the wider problem of auto-radicalising jihadists among the 20m Muslims in our midst in the West? By hook or crook, leaders such as Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria or Hosni Mubarak of Egypt have forced mainstream Islamists back onto a political track, so isolating smaller numbers of fanatic jihadists, one of the least acknowledged developments of the past decade.
The shadow war with Al-Qaeda is being won: about 3,000 fighters have been killed or captured, the fate of two-thirds of its military commanders. America is gradually adjusting its military doctrines to minimise civilian casualties. US intelligence has quietly fostered useful contacts in places such as Libya, Sudan or Yemen.
In Iraq, America is belatedly endeavouring to disaggregate the insurgents by offering former Ba’athist army officers a regular pay cheque. General John Abizaid, a Lebanese-American and head of US Central Command, is diverting manpower and money to hearts and minds initiatives in places such as Djibouti, where American soldiers are building clinics and schools and sinking wells. The aim is to attenuate the backwardness that generates future jihadists. At $600,000 (£322,000) the cost is equivalent to a couple of fins on a cruise missile and a great deal less than the $1 trillion losses caused by September 11, 2001.
Home-grown Islamist radicalism is more intractable. Some European countries, such as France, which practise external appeasement, are far harsher in their treatment of domestic extremists than Britain, which has combined appeasement of so-called “community leaders” in the Muslim Council of Britain with support for adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Appeasement has not worked, not least because such leaders are ambiguous about terrorism when it is directed at Israel and America and are not in a position to halt the global flood of incitement coming through the internet or satellite television. Groups of young friends, inflamed by scenes of Muslim defeat and oppression and stuck uncomfortably between the quiescent conservatism of their parents and western street culture, auto-radicalise by joining what amounts to a “holy gang” of mujaheddin in trainers.
In so far as western Muslim leaders can contribute anything, it is to help to deglamorise and demythologise terrorists while squarely owning up to the fact that most of the problems of the Muslim world are its own fault. The West is not responsible for the corruption and moral squalor of Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan or a dozen other places.
Muslim clerics should be encouraged to issue “opinions” or fatwas calling terrorists — and their sympathisers — heretics bent on causing destruction to fellow believers, while unequivocally condemning the sin of suicide-homicide.
While the anti-terror squad and MI5 have got the hang of putting violent Islamists on the back foot, perhaps it is time for a bit of stick rather than endless carrots, particularly as all Britons may be about to be penalised if America rescinds its visa waiver scheme with the UK because of the problem of the dual nationality of our jihadists.
Let’s start by toughening up procedures for people leaving as well as entering this country, until they can demonstrate that they are going to a wedding in Baluchistan rather than advanced bomb-making with Al-Qaeda. Why not introduce bans, not just on radical imams but also on the murky foreign financing of Islam? Saudi Arabians do not permit Christian worship in their kingdom, yet they are allowed to finance Salafist/ Wahhabi mosques here.
Sophisticates claim that faith schools enable the government to monitor what is taught. That smacks of the complacency that allowed a ragtag and bobtail of Islamist radicals to set up shop in “Londonistan” on the presumption of a “pact of security” that would insulate their naive hosts. We need schools which teach respect for the culture of Shakespeare, Bach, Raphael and Rubens, not places that favour the limited horizons of a transplanted Third World village.
Instead of pandering to “the communities” that multiculturalism has incarnated, Ruth Kelly, secretary of state for communities and local government, might be better employed erasing its heavy institutional footprints in education and local government. Let’s have some “unity” officers, versed in what makes this country so attractive for those people who traverse continents to live here. Why is welfare being doled out to people who daily express their hatred of us?
If politicians do not demonstrate the necessary firmness to deal with what huge numbers of British people — white and black, Christian, Hindu, Sufi, Sikh or Jew — are terrified by, it might not be Islamofascists that we have most to worry about.
Michael Burleigh is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and author of Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al-Qaeda, to be published by Harper Press on October 16
Isn't that how disinformation is supposed to work?
I think the fundamental problem with the "fascist" label is that it suggests that the totalitarian elements of the ideology were artificially grafted onto Islam from evil Europeans, rather than being an organic outgrowth of the extreme Wahabi sect. Hence, the term "Islamic Fundamentalism" is more apropos.
If it quacks like an Islamo-Fascist...
Although as a more 'modern' term for them, facist would fit because of their aliance with Nazi Germany during WWII.
All over the world, victims wear blood on their clothes to raise awareness of Islamo-Fascism.
lol, good one.
I think "Islamofascist" sums them up nicely. "Totalitarian" would be more precise, but not everyone knows what it means.
Garbage. Nationalism is right there, only the "nation" group is defined as umma - i.e. in religious rather than in genetic terms. Thus this difference is illusory. Tribalism and clannishness are there as well, of course. As for economical basis - it is irrelevant from the beginning, for one needs to look not at marxian economics, but at the ideology and sociology of the islamic baboonery. The term islamofascism is absolutely appropriate.
The point brought across to me is something has to be used to title these people since "murderous, fanatical, demented, toter's of an evil agenda worshipers" isn't politically correct to be used as a label.
Obviously it works well.
islamo fascists, islamo fascists, islamo fascists, islamo fascists, islamo fascists.....
I disagree with this article.
Islamofascism is a very fitting term for these terrorists, for it describes to a T exactly what they are trying to create throughout the world.
The author's argument would hold if we referred to them as "Islamonazis", but as long as we're nitpicking about terms, consider this: there are significant differences between Fascism and Nazism, particularly when it comes to matters of race.
Fascism is rule through fear, while the Nazis used fear and invoked a sort of racial myth upon which they based their movement. Thus, the fact that the Islamicists are not quite so focused upon racial matters does not mean they don't fit the "Fascist" mold of which they are accused of holding, merely that they do not fit a "Nazi" mold per se.
So let's keep calling them what they are: Islamofascists. They really do deserve the title.
To soften the label would be to turn a blind eye to the evil we now face.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
Yes and no, Yes, rich people are attracted to terrorism, mainly for the reasons you mention, but the footsoldiers tend to be poor, uneducated and easily led. The 19 hijackers of 9/11 were rich Saudis, but the bombers on the streets of Tel Aviv and Haifa are poor, and uneducated for the most part. Even when they have the benefit of education, they are led astray by mullahs who's only real education and form of literacy is learning the Koran by rote. It's a wierd melange that has a bloody, horrid end for all involved.
So let's see now. We have militant jihadism, political jihadism, cultural jihadism.
It's time we call it was it is. Islam.
was = what
I have never liked the Islamofascist label as Islam is a political ideology wrapped in religion. It is theocratic rule.
Michael Savage started the term Islamofascism on his radio show and it got some legs among conservatives. I found that Islamonazism was more descriptive (and it has since been adopted by Michael Medved on his radio show and he makes the same distinction).
Islamonazism is more appropriate as the extremists were deal with DID partner with Hitler and Nazi Germany. The savagery of their attacks on men, women, and children are comparable to Nazi attrocities. They circulate the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They deny the Holocaust. They circulate stories of Christian blood used in matzoh. It is another supremacist ideology that sees everyone else as "subhuman" (kufir; with Jews cited as the offspring of pigs and monkeys). Muslim supremacists see themselves as the new master race.
More apropriate terms might be "Islamic supremacists" and "Islamic imperialists". They do strive to establish a western capital for Islam as they did before in Spain. Islam has concepts like "Islamic territory" (which is where kufir seized in jihad must be taken before they can be divided up as slaves). And Imam say that while slavery may be an unpopular concept among the west, the laws of Mohammed cannot be changed by the worldview of man. The Imam even say that man is not to question the wisdom of Islam's teachings so there will never be a reformation movement.
It is ass-backward and foolish for the left to decry President Bush as a man trying to establish theocratic rule when he clearly fights those who have already established theocratic rule. The spineless crapweasels on the Left need to denounce the Islamic Imperialists. Then again, Communists in America had no problem with Hitler or German or Italian Fascism until Hitler betrayed their beloved Stalin.
ping
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