It's fascism -- and it's Islamic

(By Victor Davis Hanson)

George Bush recently declared that we are at war with "Islamic fascism." Muslim-American groups were quick to express furor at the expression. Middle Eastern autocracies complained that it was provocative and insensitive. 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.... 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.

Anti-Semitism is a tenet of fascism, then and now. But so is a generic hatred for unbelievers, homosexuals and blacks. The latter are slurred in the Arab media, while homosexuals were rounded up under the Taliban and the Iranian mullacracy. "Mein Kampf" sells well under its translated title "Jihadi." .... Even now, it is hard to distinguish the slurs against Jews ("pigs and apes") used in the Middle Eastern media from the venom of Joseph Goebbels' propaganda. Goose-stepping and stiff-armed salutes at Iranian and Hezbollah parades are conscious imitations of past fascist armies.

Some object that the term "Islamic fascism" is too vague to encompass the differing agendas of diverse groups such as the Wahhabis, al-Qaida and Hezbollah. But just as racist German Nazis found common ground with Asian supremacists in Japan, so too the shared hatred of the West trumps the internecine rivalries of present-day Islamists.

The common denominators are extremist views of the Koran (thus the term Islamic), and the goal of seeing authoritarianism imposed at the state level by force (thus the notion of fascism). The pairing of the two words conveys a precise message: the old fascism is back, but now driven by a radical fundamentalist creed of Islam...

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

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