Why they call it 'Islamofascism'.

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.

There is even an "Islamofascism Awareness Week." On now, this creation of neo-conservative David Horowitz will have Ann Coulter and other right-wing luminaries attend consciousness-raising sessions -- as the new left called them when the new left was new -- at universities across the United States.

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.
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"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.

So if it's imprecise, misleading and risks alienating Muslims, why use it?

"I was just talking about this a couple of days ago with David Horowitz, who was at the University of Wisconsin launching his Islamofascism Awareness Week," Payne recalls. "He said that he had to use the term Islamofascism because he needed the kind of term that seized people's attention and dramatized the situation. Whereas to use more technical, if more analytically correct terminology, such as Islamist terrorists, or Jihadis, or Jihadi terrorists --which is the kind of term that I would prefer to use -- simply doesn't have that same kind of effect."

The "fascist" tag does more than get attention, though. The word is deeply stigmatized in this culture and so anything fascist is, ipso facto, profoundly wicked, while those who fight that thing are on the side of the angels. Thus, it erects an emotionally satisfying morality play.
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"Fascist" is also a word that conjures images of a very particular history, and that, too, has a certain allure. To label jihadi terrorists "fascists" is to cast the fight against them as only the latest iteration of a long and noble struggle. For someone like Christopher Hitchens, who worships George Orwell and seems positively heartsick that he cannot volunteer to fight in the Spanish Civil War, as his hero did, that is a very pleasing thought.

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.

Many of the same commentators who have described the terrorist threat as "existential" have also written quite candidly about how the danger has made them feel more alive, aware and committed. Hitchens himself wrote a year after 9/11 that he was surprised to discover that after the shock, sorrow and rage of that day, he felt something else. "It was exhilaration."

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.

You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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