The court scholar serving Hermann of Thuringia.

The court scholar serving Hermann of Thuringia.
The scholar

2007/10/24

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

David Horowitz is running IslamoFascist Awareness Week this week. Talking Points Memo looks at an online conversation that Horowitz has with IslamOnline.net. One point that Horowitz makes is rather interesting.

Ashraf palloor: No godly religion, whether Islam or Christianity can have a merger with the fascist ideology even though fascist movements in Europe were well supported by the church authorities there. Like dumping western nuclear waste into the third world countries, western intelligentia is trying to put all the dirty things they invented into our backyards. Fundamentalism, anti Semitism, fascism, etc. were not created by any eastern thinker. I doubt there will be an Al Qaeda like organization, who authorizes suicide missions, in the muslim world if there was no CIA funded Jihad in Afghanistan.
We, our religious scholars or ordinary people, never approved the totalitarian rulers among us, but you are the one supporting them and protecting them. Can you support us to have freedom of speech or to get back our lands occupied by Israel and America peacefully or to get rid of extremists among us instead of connecting islam with fascim?

David Horowitz: The fascist movements in Europe were supported by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Ba'ath parties in Syria and Iraq, and by the Palestinians and their leader Haj Amin al-Husseini. Fascist ideology -- particularly Jew-hatred -- became integrated with Islamist ideology. If America had not supported the Afghanistan resistance, there would have been two million Muslims slaughtered by the Soviets instead of one million. The United States has rescued millions of Muslims in Somalia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. You don't say what your nationality is but if it is Palestinian, the Israelis have taken no lands that were yours. All the lands bordering on the river Jordan were controlled by the Ottoman Turks for 400 years until 1920. All the states created from these lands -- Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Israel were created out of lands that belonged to the Turks.

Sounds like Horowitz is reciting accurate history, but I wonder if two national groups can't support each other on a few issues regardless of the fact that they might disagree on just about everything else. The US made an alliance with the Muslims that inhabited areas of the former Yugoslavia during the Clinton Administration, but that doesn't mean the US supported Muslims who were living in Palestine, nor did it mean that the US hesitated to send bombers over to Iraq whenever there was a somewhat plausible reason for doing so. Horowitz has not produced any reason to use the term "Islamofascism," I've always considered it an idiot term and still do.

Update: Paul Krugman agrees: "[T]here isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t."

12 comments:

Rich Gardner said...

Actually, I thought the distinction was that one was quite real (Islam) and the other is an imaginary problem (Islamofacism) that serves the political agenda of those who promote it.

Anonymous said...

Rich,

Originally "Islamofascism" was widely used by Algerian Muslims to describe Islamists who were slaughtering Muslims in the early nineties. Do you thing they were trying to promote a political agenda or is there a chance that you could be an ignorant and arrogant prick?

Rich Gardner said...

Fascism is an economic system that simply doesn't apply to Middle Eastern countries. Muslim countries simply don't have the economies to be able to have actual fascism. I can understand Algerians feeling that fascism is something we see as bad and that we Westerners will object to anything with that name appended to it.

That's no excuse for us to apply the name where it's clearly not relevant.

If people want to object to specfic policies being put forward by Islamic countries or movements, go right ahead, but both "Islamism" and "Islamofascism" are much, much too vague to be useful designations.

I strongly object to the characterization of myself as "ignorant."

Anonymous said...

Rich,

You claim that "Fascism is an economic system" (even though it is a political ideology) while objecting to being called ignorant. When you don’t know what you are talking about and think that you do it makes you both ignorant and arrogant.

Rich Gardner said...

Okay, is fascism a political system or is it an economic system? It's kind of both, actually. Fascism was strongest in Italy, Germany, Spain and SouthEastern Europe during the 1930s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#Economic_planning

"Fascism also operated from a Social Darwinist view of human relations. Their aim was to promote "superior" individuals and weed out the weak.[35] In terms of economic practice, this meant promoting the interests of successful businessmen while destroying trade unions and other organizations of the working class.[36] Lawrence Britt suggests that protection of corporate power is an essential part of fascism.[37] Historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because "the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise... Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social."[38]"

The economies of the Middle East have nothing like this. Ergo, states that merely call themselves fascist, states that don't have the economic underpinning that true fascist states have, aren't really fascist.

Anonymous said...

1. Wikipedia is NOT a reliable source, because it can be edited by anyone.
2. However, if you wish to use Wikipedia as a source, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism clearly states: "Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology".

Economic system is a derivative of a political ideology; countries with the same political ideology may have different economic systems, i.e., communist USSR v. communist China or fascist Germany v. fascist Afghanistan (under Taliban).

Rich Gardner said...

The Communist USSR and Communist China did indeed have similar ideologies. How on Earth were the Nazis of Germany and the Taliban of Afghanistan even remotely similar?

BTW, Sunsara Taylor brings up the very good point that an anti-Sharia group would do well to avoid being associated with David Horowitz. Horowitz opposes Sharia in the same way that GW Bush opposes Osama bin Laden, i.e., they have a symbiotic relationship, they both need the other to be an enemy. It would not be in Bush's interest to see bin Laden expire, nor does Horowitz desire to see Sharia become less important.

Rich Gardner said...

But except for the massacre at Mazar-i-Sharif, there were few ethnicity-based killings. Most of the oppression the Taliban imposed was upon their own countrymen and most of that was directed at their females.

Just seems to me you're making lots and lots of appples & oranges comparisons.

Rich Gardner said...

Well overall, I'm pretty unimpressed with your case. I was a history major back in college and still read histories for the fun of it and no, I'm not what they call an "economic determinist," but I do think the economy of a state has a great deal to do with the nature of that state. Fascism, a very specific and particular type of tyranny, is the result of economies that are quite different from the economies of the Middle East. Yes, tyrannical states of the Middle Eastern are quite similar in many ways to tyrannical states elsewhere, but I think your group rather mindlessly lumps together an awful lot of apples, oranges, pears and kumquats.

Back during the Reagan Administration, our government got very, very excitable about "terrorists." What was a terrorist? Well, it appeared to be something pretty specific until we heard what the Contras were doing down in Central America. Then it became pretty clear that the distinction between a "terrorist" and a Contra was simply that one worked for the US and the other didn't. Sorry, but I think the distinction between an "Islamist" and another type of Middle Easterner is pretty much the same thing.

Anonymous said...

"I was a history major back in college"

You deserve a full refund.

Rich Gardner said...

Orcinus puts has put together an excellent post on what fascism is and isn't in response to Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.
As I explained above, fascism is a bit more complicated than just authoritarianism.

Rich Gardner said...
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