Shortly after British authorities announced that they had foiled a plot to bomb transcontinental flights, President Bush called it a “stark reminder” that the United States is “at war with Islamic fascists.”
The president’s comments triggered a series of responses. The Saudi government rejected even the possibility of Islamic fascism. A spokesman for King Abdullah said that “what Islam is being charged with today, such as fascism, is primarily the result of Western cultural heritage.”
Closer to home, American liberals, of course, called it politically incorrect to say this. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, suggested that expressions like “Islamic fascists” might inadvertently “start a religious war against Islam and Muslims.” It complained that the expression “attaches the religion of Islam to tyranny and fascism, rather than isolating the threat to a specific group of individuals...”
If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that CAIR was kidding. The expression “Islamic fascism” is used in order to distinguish between ordinary Muslims and the perpetrators of terrorism. It serves also to make a point that our enemy isn’t Islam itself, but a particular kind of Islam that perpetrates terrorism and tyranny. These are the distinctions that groups like CAIR ought to be supporting.
That still leaves the question: Is it right to call the bin Ladens of the world “Islamic fascists”? The answer is “yes.” The president was right on.
As Stephen Morris of Johns Hopkins recently wrote, fascism’s goal is to “achieve national greatness” through totalitarian control of both political and social life; it seeks to create an empire; and it “aspires to re-create a mythical past.”
Sound familiar? It should. What was true of Germany and Italy in the 1930s and ’40s is also true of groups like Iran, al-Qaeda, and millions of Islamic radicals today.
Countries like Iran and Afghanistan under the Taliban are and were undeniably totalitarian. All aspects of life, not just politics, are subject to strict ideological control.
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