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The term "Islamofascism" is a controversial political epithet used to suggest that certain variants of Islamism have fascist or totalitarian aspects. "Fascism" has been traditionally invoked to describe the merger of state and corporate power under a totalitarian government.
Commentators on Islamofascism
- Andrew Sullivan — U.S. journalist and blogger has used the term several times in his blog.
- Christopher Hitchens — British journalist based in the US has written about what he calls "Islamic fascism".
- Joseph Sobran — Conservative Catholic commentator who writes, "Islamofascism is nothing but an empty propaganda term. And wartime propaganda is usually, if not always, crafted to produce hysteria, the destruction of any sense of proportion. Such words, undefined and unmeasured, are used by people more interested in making us lose our heads than in keeping their own."
- Clifford May — president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. "What we have to understand is ... this is not really a war against terrorism, this is not really a war against al Qaeda, this is a war against movements and ideologies that are jihadist, that are Islamofascists, that aim to destroy the Western world."
- George Orwell — the British essayist and novelist writes "...the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else."
- Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan writes "it is hard to see the difference between the bigotry of anti-Semitism as an evil and the bigotry that Medved displays toward Islam. It is more offensive than I can say for him to use the word "Islamo-fascist." Islam is a sacred term to 1.3 billion people in the world. It enshrines their highest ideals. To combine it with the word "fascist" in one phrase is a desecration and a form of hate speech. Are there Muslims who are fascists? Sure. But there is no Islamic fascism, since "Islam" has to do with the highest ideals of the religion. In the same way, there have been lots of Christian fascists, but to speak of Christo-Fascism is just offensive."
- Richard Webster — Author of A Brief History of Blasphemy: liberalism, censorship and 'The Satanic Verses'. He wrote in the New Statesman "The idea that there is some kind of autonomous "Islamofascism" that can be crushed, or that the west may defend itself against the terrorists who threaten it by cultivating that eagerness to kill militant Muslims which Hitchens urges upon us, is a dangerous delusion. The symptoms that have led some to apply the label of "Islamofascism" are not reasons to forget root causes. They are reasons for us to examine even more carefully what those root causes actually are." He adds "'Saddam, Arafat and the Saudis hate the Jews and want to see them destroyed' . . . or so says the right-wing writer Andrew Sullivan. And he has a point. Does the western left really grasp the extent of anti-Semitism in the Middle East? But does the right grasp the role of Europeans in creating such hatred?"
See also
- Islamism and Islam as a political movement — Islam as a political movement.
- Islamic democracy
- Islamophobia
External links
- Andrew Sullivan Interview from INDC Journal
- The Islamofascist Agenda by Deroy Murdock in National Review
- How the right played the fascism card against Islam — The Guardian (4 February, 2005)
- What is Fascism?, by George Orwell