MB Civic

ZNet Commentary
Wrong War, Wrong Word  August 30, 2006
By Katha Pollitt

If you control the language, you control the debate. As the Bush Administration’s Middle Eastern policy sinks ever deeper into bloody incoherence, the “war on terror” has been getting a quiet linguistic makeover. It’s becoming the “war on Islamic fascism.” The term has been around for a while–Nexis takes it back to 1990, whet the writer and historian  Malise Ruthven used “Islamo-fascism” in the London Independent to describe the authoritarian governments of the Muslim world; after 9/11  it was picked up by neocons and prowar pundits, including Stephen Schwartz in  the Spectator and
Christopher Hitchens in this  magazine, to describe a broad swath of Muslim bad guys from Osama to the mullahs of Iran.

But the term moved into the mainstream this August when
Bush referred to the recently  thwarted Britain-based  suicide attack plot on airplanes as “a stark reminder that this nation is  at war with Islamic fascists.” Joe Lieberman compares Iraq to “the Spanish Civil War, which was the harbinger of  what was to come.” The move away from “war on terrorism” arrives not a  moment too soon for  language fussbudgets who  had problems with the idea of  making war on a tactic. To say nothing of those who  wondered why, if terrorism
was the problem, invading  Iraq was the solution. (From  the President’s August 21  press conference: Q: “But  what did Iraq have to do with  September 11?” A: “Nothing.”  Now he tells us!)

What’s wrong with “Islamo-fascism”? For
starters, it’s a terrible 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.

Call me pedantic, but if only to remind us
that the worst barbarities of the modern
era were committed by the most modern
people, I think it is worth preserving
“fascism” as a term with specific historical
content.

Second, and more important, “Islamo-fascism” conflates a wide variety of disparate states, movements and organizations as if, like the fascists, they all want similar things and are working together to achieve them.

Neocons have called Saddam Hussein and the Baathists of Syria Islamo-fascists, but these relatively secular nationalist tyrants
have nothing in common with shadowy stateless, fundamentalist Al Qaeda–as even Bush now acknowledges–or with the
Taliban, who want to return Afghanistan to the seventh century; and the Taliban aren’t much like Iran, which is different from (and
somewhat less repressive than) Saudi Arabia–whoops, our big ally in the Middle East!

Who are the “Islamo-fascists” in Saudi
Arabia–the current regime or its
religious-fanatical opponents? It was under
the actually existing US-supported
government that female students were
forced back into their burning school
rather than be allowed to escape unveiled.
Under that government people are lashed
and beheaded, women can’t vote or drive,
non-Muslim worship is forbidden, a
religious dress code is enforced by the
state through violence and Wahhabism–
the “Islamo-fascist” denomination–is
exported around the globe.  “Islamo-
fascism” looks like an analytic term, but
really it’s an emotional one, intended to
get us to think less and fear more. It
presents the bewildering politics of the
Muslim world as a simple matter of Us
versus Them, with war to the end the only
answer, as with Hitler.

If you doubt that every other British
Muslim under the age of 30 is ready to
blow himself up for Allah, or that
shredding the Constitution is the way to
protect ourselves from suicide bombers, if
you think that Hamas might be less popular
if Palestinians were less miserable, you get
cast as Neville Chamberlain, while Bush
plays FDR.

“Islamo-fascism” rescues the neocons from
harsh verdicts on the invasion of Iraq
“cakewalk… roses… sweetmeats… Chalabi”)
by reframing that ongoing debacle as a
minor chapter in a much larger story of evil
madmen who want to fly the green flag of
Islam over the capitals of the West.
Suddenly it’s just a detail that Saddam
wasn’t connected with 9/11, had no WMDs,
was not poised to attack the United States
or Israel–he hated freedom, and that was
enough.

It doesn’t matter, either, that Iraqi Sunnis
and Shiites seem less interested in uniting
the umma than in murdering one another.
With luck we’ll be scared we won’t ask why
anyone should listen to another word from
people who were spectacularly wrong
about the biggest politico-military
initiative of the past thirty years, and their
balding heads will continue to glow on our
TV screens for many nights to come. On to
Tehran!

It remains to be seen if “Islamo-fascism”
will win back the socially liberal “security
moms” who voted for Bush in 2004 but
have recently been moving toward the
Democrats. But the word is already getting
a big reaction in the Muslim world. As I
write the New York Times is carrying a full
page “open letter” to Bush from the Al
Kharafi Group, the mammoth Kuwaiti
construction company, featuring photos of
dead and wounded Lebanese civilians. “We
think there is a misunderstanding in
determining: “‘Who deserves to be accused
of being a fascist’!!!!”

“Islamo-fascism” enrages to no purpose
the dwindling number of Muslims who
don’t already hate us. At the same time, it
clouds with ideology a range of situations–Lebanon, Palestine, airplane and subway bombings, Afghanistan, Iraq–we need to
see clearly and distinctly and deal with in a
focused way.

No wonder the people who brought us the
disaster in Iraq are so fond of it.