…while others defend the Islamofascists.  In the wake of the Islamofascist Awareness Week protests two articles caught my eye.

One defends the use of the word itself, which the New Oxford American Dictionary, defines  as “a controversial term equating some modern Islamic movements with the European fascist movements of the early twentieth century”.  

Defending Islamofascism:  It’s a valid term. Here’s why.

The attempt by David Horowitz and his allies to launch “Islamofascism Awareness Week” on American campuses has been met with a variety of responses. One of these is a challenge to the validity of the term itself. It’s quite the done thing, in liberal academic circles, to sneer at any comparison between fascist and jihadist ideology. People like Tony Judt write to me to say, in effect, that it’s a historical and simplistic to do so. And in some media circles, another kind of reluctance applies: Alan Colmes thinks that one shouldn’t use the word Islamic even to designate jihad, because to do so is to risk incriminating an entire religion.

Which ignores the obvious fact that the term is not meant to be applied as an all inclusive property, it is a specific label assigned to a particularly virulent subset is Islam, and all attempts by the liberals and Islam defenders is disingenuous. 

Oddly enough my 17 year old daughter immediate grasped this distinction, yet most liberals will not.

He and others don’t want to tag Islam even in its most extreme form with a word as hideous as fascism. Finally, I have seen and heard it argued that the term is unfair or prejudiced because it isn’t applied to any other religion.

Well, that last claim is certainly not true. It was once very common, especially on the left, to prefix the word fascism with the word clerical. This was to recognize the undeniable fact that, from Spain to Croatia to Slovakia, there was a very direct link between fascism and the Roman Catholic Church. More recently, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, coined the term Judeo-Nazi to describe the Messianic settlers who moved onto the occupied West Bank after 1967. So, there need be no self-pity among Muslims about being “singled out” on this point.

The term Islamofascism was first used in 1990 in Britain’s Independent newspaper by Scottish writer Malise Ruthven, who was writing about the way in which traditional Arab dictatorships used religious appeals in order to stay in power.

Actually it apparently goes back farther.  From Wiki: “Comparisons were made between fascism and Islam, as far back as 1937, when the German Catholic emigré Edgar Alexander compared National Socialism with “Mohammedanism” , and again, in 1939, when psychologist Carl Jung said about Adolf Hitler, “he is like Mohammed. The emotion in Germany is Islamic, warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with a wild god.”

According to Roger Scruton of the Wall Street Journal, the term was introduced by the French historian Maxime Rodinson to describe the Iranian Revolution of 1978. Scruton claims that Rodinson “was a Marxist, who described as ‘fascist’ any movement of which he disapproved”, but credits him with inventing a “convenient way of announcing that you are not against Islam but only against its perversion by the terrorists.” .

Back to Hitchens:

I didn’t know about this when I employed the term “fascism with an Islamic face” to describe the attack on civil society on Sept. 11, 2001, and to ridicule those who presented the attack as some kind of liberation theology in action. “Fascism with an Islamic face” is meant to summon a dual echo of both Alexander Dubcek and Susan Sontag (if I do say so myself), and in any case, it can’t be used for everyday polemical purposes, so the question remains: Does Bin Ladenism or Salafism or whatever we agree to call it have anything in common with fascism?

I think yes. The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. (”Death to the intellect! Long live death!” as Gen. Francisco Franco’s sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined “humiliations” and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual “deviance”—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.

Wrapping up with:

This makes it permissible, it seems to me, to mention the two phenomena in the same breath and to suggest that they constitute comparable threats to civilization and civilized values. There is one final point of comparison, one that is in some ways encouraging. Both these totalitarian systems of thought evidently suffer from a death wish. It is surely not an accident that both of them stress suicidal tactics and sacrificial ends, just as both of them would obviously rather see the destruction of their own societies than any compromise with infidels or any dilution of the joys of absolute doctrinal orthodoxy. Thus, while we have a duty to oppose and destroy these and any similar totalitarian movements, we can also be fairly sure that they will play an unconscious part in arranging for their own destruction, as well.

  I think Hitchens could be summed up with the simple phrase “if it looks like a duck…”

To me, it boils down to making observations of verifiable actions and statements, making an evaluation of the attitudes and motivations and cataloging their stated goals and historical actions.  The only conclusion I get is that there is and always has been a subset of Islam that is warlike, cruel, violent and aggressive.

We didn’t create it, it has been around a long time, contrary to apologists.

I found the duck pretty easily.  I have also met Muslims who abhor violence.  At no time would I attempt to generalize those two categories as the same.

The other article was by Ann Coulter.  I have been reading her books lately, and I am finding some interesting tidbits in them.  Ann is a tough cookie.  Reading her books is not for the faint of heart because she enjoys outrage, so writes outrageously.  And yet, back in 2001 she was writing columns that are as true if not more so today than they were then.

Her latest column addresses the liberal and Muslim outrage over Islamofascism.

Have You Hugged an Islamo-Fascist Today

College liberals are in a fit of pique because various speakers are coming to their campuses this week as part of David Horowitz’s Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week — not to be confused with Islamo-Fascism Appreciation Week, which I believe is in April.

Apparently liberals support Islamo-fascism.

…

College campuses across the nation are installing foot baths to accommodate Muslims’ daily bathing ritual, while surgically removing the Ten Commandments from every public space in America. Maybe the Ten Commandments could be printed on towels and kept next to the foot baths.

The National Council for Social Studies recommended a lesson plan after 9/11 that included a story titled “My Name Is Osama” about a nasty little white boy, “Todd,” who taunts a fine upstanding Iraqi immigrant named “Osama.” Go ahead, laugh it up — we’ll see who’s laughing when “My Name Is Osama” ends up on ABC’s prime-time lineup next year.

This story was proposed in response to an event in which Muslims with names like “Osama” committed the most massive hate crime in U.S. history against 3,000 innocent civilians with names like “Todd.”

Interestingly she mentioned this story in her column years ago too.

And then when speakers like Cyrus Nowrasteh, the writer and producer of the ABC miniseries “The Path to 9/11,” and Nonie Darwish, whose father founded the Fedayeen, show up on college campuses to criticize Islamic terrorism, the Democratic base threatens to riot. The only thing that makes the cut-and-run crowd mad enough to fight is the idea that someone, somewhere might be criticizing radical Islam.

Consequently, the speakers for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week require the sort of security phalanx one would expect for someone more like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Oh wait — no. Ahmadinejad was cheered by college students a few weeks ago — at least until he expressed reservations about sodomy. (On the basis of Ahmadinejad’s claims, instead of looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, how about we start looking for gays in Iran?)

Even American intellectuals like Dennis Prager and Michael Medved who are speaking during Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week are denounced by liberals as if they were David Duke. One pro-Islamo-fascism Web site indicts Medved on the grounds that he “has claimed that Islam has a ’special violence problem.’” It doesn’t get much more diplomatic than that.

…

Congressional Democrats are constantly calling for conservative private citizens to be silenced. Even Democratic candidates for president and their wives are getting in on the act.

A few weeks ago, in the midst of Senate Democrats’ demand that Rush Limbaugh’s microphone be silenced, Lizzie Edwards distracted herself from the latest National Enquirer by announcing on Air America that Limbaugh’s draft deferment was phony.

…

Liberals claim to be terrified that the Religious Right is going to take over the culture in a country where more than a million babies are exterminated every year, kindergarteners can be expelled from school for mentioning God, and Islamic fascists are welcomed on college campuses while speakers opposed to Islamic fascism are met with angry protests.

If liberals want to face real fascism, try showing up on a college campus and denouncing fascism.

I wont say I agree with every point, but it does seem a strange truth that Islamic terrorism - that is terrorism carried out by Islamic radicals in the name of Islam based on their interpretation of Islam - is so hard to be outraged about, and carries so much defense by some liberals.

Sorry that duck has quacked too much for me to blithely give it a pass. 

Ann in one of her books had a startlingly simple answer to the whole problem.

She said:  As long as Liberals are going to keep demanding that Americans refer to Islam as a ”Religion of Peace,” it would be a big help if Muslims would stop killing people.

Indeed.  It would also be helpful if the peaceful Muslims would stop being affiliated with the worst of the dregs, like Hamas and Hezbollah.  And it would really help if more of their Clerics would stand up for the truth of Islam, and be more openly condemning of the Islamofascist tactics.

Yes I know many are.  Not nearly enough though.

Regardless, until the Islamofascists abandon terrorism and fear tactics, they will have to live with the label it earns them.

And the peaceful Muslims should earn their label by detailing and showcasing their differences.  If they are not the same, that will be apparent to any except the most ignorant bigoted person, to whom no amount of change will make a difference anyway.

I personally will continue to use discretion and distinction to tell the difference, and let the ducks fall where they will.

  Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Stop the ACLU, Perri Nelson’s Website, , Stix Blog, Right Truth, The Populist, Shadowscope, Stuck On Stupid, The Amboy Times, Pursuing Holiness, Adeline and Hazel, Right Celebrity, third world county, Woman Honor Thyself, The Uncooperative Radio Show!, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Right Voices, Church and State, Lost Paradise, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, AZAMATTEROFACT, A Blog For All, 123beta, guerrilla radio, Adam’s Blog, The Bullwinkle Blog, Cao’s Blog, Big Dog’s Weblog, Jo’s Cafe, Conservative Cat, Conservative Thoughts, Nuke’s, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, The World According to Carl, Walls of the City, Blue Star Chronicles, Republican National Convention Blog, CORSARI D’ITALIA, High Desert Wanderer, The Yankee Sailor, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.