Author:
Publication: The Patriot Post
Date:
URL: http://patriotpost.us/papers/primer05.asp
From Patriot Post Vol. 06 No. 34; Published
25 August 2006
Responding to breaking news of the thwarted
Jihadi attacks against a dozen commercial flights from Great Britain to the
United States this week, President George W. Bush did the unthinkable: He
described the would-be killers in accurate terms.
"The recent arrests that our fellow citizens
are now learning about are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with
Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom,
to hurt our nation," the President remarked.
Key words: "Islamic fascists".
Nearly five years since September 11, 2001,
President George W. Bush has finally dropped his politically correct gloves
and called the enemy of the West by the descriptor it deserves. This enemy
is exclusively Muslim, and it has a modus operandi and worldview consistent
with other forms of fascism.
Predictably, America's Islamic lobby was quick
to object. "We have to isolate these individuals because there is nothing
in the Koran or the Islamic faith that encourages people to be cruel or to
be vicious or to be criminal," said Nihad Awad, executive director of
the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "Muslims worldwide know that
for sure."
For sure?
In a recent article in Jurist, Ali Khan of
the Washburn University School of Law echoed Awad. "It is becoming fashionable
for elected officials in the Anglo-American world, notably in the United States
and the United Kingdom, to employ abusive language involving Islam,"
he wrote. "Phrases such as 'Islamic terrorism,' 'totalitarian Islam,'
'crimes of Islam,' and 'Islamic fascism' are freely used, with sadist disrespect,
to condemn real and imagined terrorists who practice the faith of Islam."
Is it possible, then, that by equating the
doctrine and practice of Islam with the acts of a radicalized few, President
Bush is blurring these lines?
Not according to Daniel Pipes, historian of
Islam and director of the Middle East Forum. The President, he says, is "identifying
not Islam the religion, but a radical form of Islam." Indeed, how many
times have we heard presidential speeches laced with language about the "religion
of peace" and our commonality as "people of the book"? Such
language allows Awad and Khan to take comfort in the knowledge that Islam
is good, but that terrorism -- which doesn't in any way represent Islam --
is bad.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's recent
address to the U.S. Congress certainly reflected the President's heretofore
clear distinction between terrorism and Islam. In that speech, the prime minister
spoke of the war in Iraq as "a battle between true Islam, for which a
person's liberty and rights constitute essential cornerstones, and terrorism,
which wraps itself in a fake Islamic cloak; in reality, wages a war on Islam
and Muslims and values, and spreads hatred between humanity. Wherever human
kind suffers a loss at the hands of terrorists, it is a loss of all humanity."
So, is our fight against terrorism or against
Islamic fascism? To wit, is Islam peaceful, or intrinsically fascist?
The answers couldn't be clearer. Terrorism
is not an enemy; it's a tactic. Muslim examples aside, terrorist tactics have
been adopted by groups as varied as Northern Ireland's IRA, Colombia's FARC,
the Shining Path of Peru, West Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang, Italy's Brigate
Rosse, Spain's Basque ETA, and our homegrown Symbionese Liberation Army. Mostly
separatists and leftists, none of these groups viewed terrorism as an end
in itself, but as a means to another, political end.
Unlike terrorism, Islam is an ideology bent
on territorial expansion and political domination. These traits, along with
iron-fisted socioeconomic controls, are the essential characteristics of fascism.
When this expansion requires violence, Islam turns to jihad, and within the
context of jihad, terrorism is an acceptable tactic. According to Pipes, "Islam
is a political religion in a way that none other is. There are many elements
within the religion and the history of Islam that suggest there is a dynamic
of conquest." Pipes continues, "There is something inherently expansionist
about Islam. Jihad is expansionist warfare."
Stephen Schwartz, executive director of the
Center for Islamic Pluralism, coined the term "Islamofascism," and
he compares it other forms of fascism: "Islamofascism similarly pursues
its aims through the willful, arbitrary, and gratuitous disruption of global
society, either by terrorist conspiracies or by violation of peace between
states. Al-Qaeda has recourse to the former weapon; Hezbollah, in assaulting
northern Israel, used the latter. These are not acts of protest, but calculated
strategies for political advantage through undiluted violence." Schwartz
continues, "Fascism was totalitarian; i.e. it fostered a totalistic world
view -- a distinct social reality that separated its followers from normal
society. Islamofascism parallels fascism by imposing a strict division between
Muslims and alleged unbelievers."
When we look to the deserts of the Middle
East at the founding of Islam in the early 7th century, such a picture is
clear. At that time, increased trade across western Arabia created unprecedented
wealth, resulting in the rise of new urban centers that directly challenged
traditional tribal structures and loyalties. These urban centers quickly came
to represent a different set of interests from the tribal communities, and
a period of internecine conflict and social upheaval ensued.
In this context, the prophet Mohammed offered
an alternative: the oma, the community professing the exclusive divinity of
Allah, the moon god of polytheistic Arabia, and Mohammed as Allah's prophetic
voice. In creating the oma, Mohammed and his followers forged an inextricable
merger of politics and religion. To this day, there has never been a separation
-- a "Reformation" -- in Islam. This is due to the very nature of
the oma, which must not only be defended militarily, politically and economically
-- but also expanded. Mohammed's efforts to reconstitute the basis of authority
and organization in Arabia -- from polytheism to a political monotheism, from
cities and tribes to the oma -- made Islam's expansionism a certainty.
Like other forms of fascism, Islam's expansionist
impulse would involve violence, subjugation to the state, and conformity to
the ideology of the system. As Mohammed writes in the Koran, "Fight those
who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what
Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth,
out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment
of superiority and they are in a state of subjection (Surah 009.029)."
Further, Al Bukhari records Mohammed as saying: "I have been ordered
to fight with the people till they say, 'None has the right to be worshipped
but Allah'."
If this is what Islam is all about -- fascist
expansionism and totalitarianism -- where do moderate or liberal Muslims come
from? In short, they come from the same place that liberal Christians and
Jews come from. Confronted by the 18th century Enlightenment and its heir,
modernism, all religious expressions have found themselves influenced by the
ideas and ideals of secular humanism. As Muslims integrated with the West
and the West came into increased contact with the Muslim East, Islam experienced
the same synthesis. Consequently, liberal Christians, Muslims, Jews and atheists,
all under the influence of modernism, confess the same essential creed: The
intrinsic equality of human beings, a basic commitment to man's reason, the
supremacy of the individual, and man's innate goodness in the state of nature.
Thus, like liberal Christianity or Judaism, liberal Islam isn't Islam at all;
it's an entirely different religion.
In the end, any realistic assessment of Islam
must accept "fascism" as a term that is far more descriptive than
pejorative. In his remarks on the hurtful nature of the term, Professor Khan
said that if anyone is "using the label in this broad sense, and thus
accusing Islam and not merely the militants, they should say so."
Well, we're saying so.
Regarding the "deafening silence"
of Islamic leaders and adherents in the United States who never condemn the
slaughter of innocents by their fellow Muslims, we invoke the inimitable words
of President Bush the week of 9/11: "Either you are with us, or you are
with the terrorists."
