Monday, October 22, 2007

Fascinating Islamofascism

This is "Islamofascism Awareness Week," a university and college campus awareness-raising campaign launched by professional anti-liberal David Horowitz and his allies. One response to Islamofascism Awareness Week, on the part of liberal intellectuals and others, has been to question the validity of the term "Islamofascism."

"Islamofascism" is, of course, nearly indistinguishable from the phrase "Islamic fascism," or "fascism with an Islamic face," which were promoted after 9/11 by journalists like Stephen Schwartz (a neoconservative) and Christopher Hitchens (a liberal critical of what currently passes for liberalism, which might sound like a neoconservative but isn't quite the same thing). Like fascists in the past century, according to Hitchens, et al., Islamist terrorists draw inspiration from what they believe to be an earlier golden age; they are outraged by what they regarded as their historical humiliation; they blame the Jews for this humiliation; and they want to use force to establish a new golden age marked by an all-encompassing (totalitarian) social, political, and economic system.

Katha Pollitt, writing in The Nation in 2006, claimed that "Islamofascism" is a lousy historical analogy:

Italian Fascism, German Nazism and other European fascist movements of the 1920s and '30s were nationalist and secular, closely allied with international capital and aimed at creating powerful, up-to-date, all-encompassing states. Some of the trappings might have been anti-modernist -- Mussolini looked back to ancient Rome, the Nazis were fascinated by Nordic mythology and other Wagnerian folderol -- but the basic thrust was modern, bureaucratic and rational. You wouldn't find a fascist leader consulting the Bible to figure out how to organize the banking system or the penal code or the women's fashion industry. Even its anti-Semitism was "scientific": The problem was the Jews' genetic inferiority and otherness, which countless biologists, anthropologists and medical researchers were called upon to prove -- not that the Jews killed Christ and refused to accept the true faith.

But Hitchens, writing in Slate today, defends the term Islamofascism, which he claims was coined in 1990 in Britain's Independent newspaper by Scottish writer Malise Ruthven. "Does Bin Ladenism or Salafism or whatever we agree to call it have anything in common with fascism?" demands Hitchens. "I think yes."

Writing at Inside Higher Ed last week, Scott McLemee turned the tables on Horowitz and the other organizers of Islamofascism Awareness Week, whom he calls Islamophobes. Parodying their breathless warnings about Islamofascists, he wrote:

Unfortunately a handful of troublemakers thrive among [the Islamophobes], parasitically. They spew out hatred through Web sites. They seek to silence their critics, and to recruit impressionable young people. Perhaps it is unfair to confuse matters through calling the moderates and the militants by the same name. It would be more fitting to say that the latter are really Islamophobofascists. Some might find the expression offensive. That is too bad. If we don't resist Islamophobofascism now, its intolerance can only spread.

Doing his part, McLemee declared last week Islamophobistfascist Awareness Week.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:28 PM

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