MoonDawg's Den: An Accurate Term

MoonDawg's Den

Thursday, August 17, 2006

An Accurate Term

There is a Harold Evans article in yesterday's Guardian (via Instapundit) that is relevant to our discussion of the term "Islamofascism":

The civil rights lobbies are working from a passé play book. They are blind to the lethal nature of the new Salafist totalitarianism. They won't recognize that we are facing an irrationalist movement immune to compromise and dedicated to achieve its ends of controlling every aspect of daily life, every process of the mind, through indiscriminate mass slaughter. It is a culture obsessed with death, a culture that despises women, a culture devoted to mad hatreds not just of Americans and Jews everywhere, but of Muslims anywhere who embrace a less totalitarian, less radical, more humane view of Islam. These Muslims are to be murdered, and have been in their thousands, along with "the pigs of Jews, the monkeys of Christians" and all the "dirty infidels"...

...These are historic fault lines. The right tolerated fascism in the thirties, the left Soviet Communism in the fifties. Of course these two earlier totalitarian movements were different in nature and our response when it came was not always well judged - the tendency is to think first of the excesses of the right typified by the witch hunts of the odious McCarthy, but we should remember, too, that the Democratic party in the immediate postwar years of Henry Wallace would have abandoned Europe just as the left in the eighties would have left Europe at the mercy of the new Soviet missiles.

The apologists for the Islamo-fascists - an accurate term - leave millions around the world exposed to a less obvious but more insidious barbarism.

Indeed - it is especially "less obvious" to those who remain willfully blind to the threat.

3 Comments:

  • What in that quote "proves" that fascist is the correct term. It proves that terrorists are evil--I'm not disputing that. There is nothing in your citation that lends credibility to the term. In fact, I think it just shows that indeed the term is meant to draw comparisons with the Hitler regime, which isn't a real accurate comparison, so it must be for the fear factor.

    By Blogger Jeff, At 11:44 PM, August 17, 2006  

  • The "willfully blind" article simplifies Kerry's position into a black and white scenario--Kerry said Iraq is now a breeding ground for terrorists and wasn't before, so he means that Saddam was just a great guy. That's very disingenuous to his statement, and I believe it's willfully misleading. Why don't conservatives see that not every issue is black and white, either/or. There are many shades of gray in political discourse, and this article ignores all of them.

    Also, how is a Kerry quote from 2004 relevent to this discussion?

    By Blogger Jeff, At 11:50 PM, August 17, 2006  

  • Hey Jeff, I guess you missed my response that I put under your initial post, so I will reproduce it here:

    I appreciate the point being made about what fascism is. However, those who use the term "Islamofascist" have a Webster's definition in mind when we speak of the Jihadists:

    "a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control"

    Bin Laden and his ilk want to restore the Caliphate and impose Sharia law on all of humanity, whether we want it or not. If that's not "a tendency toward strong autocratic or dictatorial control", I don't know what is. To apply the term "Islamofascist" is not fear-mongering, it is simply recognizing the enemy for what they are.


    Thus I was merely using Evans' piece to augment that line of reasoning.

    As to Kerry, the contention of the Spectator piece was not to argue that Kerry thought Saddam was a "great guy". Rather, it demonstrates that Kerry's statement saying pre-war Iraq was not "a haven for terrorists" is demonstrably false.

    By Blogger Garry, At 10:54 AM, August 21, 2006  

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