DebateGate

As much as it might pain Js and others as to how inaccurate such a term is supposed to be, I'm going to keep calling a duck a duck, in this case.  And this op-ed helps that POV along

Islamic Fascism 101
On all they’ve done to earn the name.
By Victor Davis Hanson

Make no apologies for the use of “Islamic fascism.” It is the perfect nomenclature for the agenda of radical Islam, for a variety of historical and scholarly reasons. That such usage also causes extreme embarrassment to both the Islamists themselves and their leftist “anti-fascist” appeasers in the West is just too bad.
 
First, the general idea of “fascism” — the creation of a centralized authoritarian state to enforce blanket obedience to a reactionary, all-encompassing ideology — fits well the aims of contemporary Islamism that openly demands implementation of sharia law and the return to a Pan-Islamic and theocratic caliphate.

In addition, Islamists, as is true of all fascists, privilege their own particular creed of true believers by harkening back to a lost, pristine past, in which the devout were once uncorrupted by modernism.

True, bin Laden’s mythical Volk doesn’t bath in the clear icy waters of the Rhine untouched by the filth of the Tiber; but rather they ride horses and slice the wind with their scimitars in service of a soon to be reborn majestic world of caliphs and mullahs. Osama bin Laden sashaying in his flowing robes is not all that different from the obese Herman Goering in reindeer horns plodding around his Karinhall castle with suspenders and alpine shorts.

Because fascism is born out of insecurity and the sense of failure, hatred for Jews is de rigueur. To read al Qaeda’s texts is to reenter the world of Mein Kampf (naturally now known as jihadi in the Arab world). The crackpot minister of its ideology, Dr. Zawahiri, is simply a Dr. Alfred Rosenberg come alive — a similar quarter-educated buffoon, who has just enough of a vocabulary to dress up fascist venom in a potpourri of historical misreadings and pseudo-learning.

Envy and false grievance, as in the past with Italian, German, or Japanese whining, are always imprinted deeply within the fascist mind. After all, it can never quite figure out why the morally pure, the politically zealous, the ever more obedient are losing out to corrupt and decadent democracies — where “mixing,” either in the racial or religious sense, should instead have enervated the people.

The “will” of the German people, like the “Banzai” spirit of the Japanese, should always trump the cowardly and debased material superiority of decadent Western democracies. So al Qaeda boasts that in Somalia and Afghanistan the unshakeable creed of Islam overcame the richer and better equipped Americans and Russians. To read bin Laden’s communiqués is to be reminded of old Admiral Yamamato assuring his creepy peers that his years in the United States in the 1920s taught him that Roaring Twenties America, despite its fancy cars and skyscrapers, simply could not match the courage of the chosen Japanese.

Second, fascism thrives best in a once proud, recently humbled, but now ascendant, people. They are ripe to be deluded into thinking contemporary setbacks were caused by others and are soon to be erased through ever more zealotry. What Versailles and reparations were to Hitler’s new Germany, what Western colonialism and patronizing in the Pacific were to the rising sun of the Japanese, what the embarrassing image of the perennial sick man of Europe was to Mussolini’s new Rome, so too Israel, modernism, and America’s ubiquitous pop culture are to the Islamists, confident of a renaissance via vast petro-weatlh.

Such reactionary fascism is complex because it marries the present’s unhappiness with moping about a regal past — with glimpses of an even more regal future. Fascism is not quite the narcotic of the hopeless, but rather the opiate of the recently failed now on the supposed rebound who welcome the cheap fix of blaming others and bragging about their own iron will.

Third, while there is generic fascism, its variants naturally weave preexisting threads familiar to a culture at large. Hitler’s brand cribbed together notions of German will, Aryanism, and the cult of the Ubermensch from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Spengler, with ample Nordic folk romance found from Wagner to Tacitus’s Germania. Japanese militarism’s racist creed, fanaticism, and sense of historical destiny were a motley synthesis of Bushido, Zen and Shinto Buddhism, emperor worship, and past samurai legends. Mussolini’s fasces, and the idea of an indomitable Caesarian Duce (or Roman Dux), were a pathetic attempt to resurrect imperial Rome. So too Islamic fascism draws on the Koran, the career of Saladin, and the tracts of Nasserites, Baathists, and Muslim Brotherhood pamphleteers.

Fourth, just as it was idle in the middle of World War II to speculate how many Germans, Japanese, or Italians really accepted the silly hatred of Hitler, Mussolini, or Tojo, so too it is a vain enterprise to worry over how many Muslims follow or support al Qaeda, or, in contrast,  how many in the Middle East actively resist Islamists.

Most people have no ideology, but simply accommodate themselves to the prevailing sense of an agenda’s success or failure. Just as there weren’t more than a dozen vocal critics of Hitler after the Wehrmacht finished off France in six weeks in June of 1940, so too there wasn’t a Nazi to be found in June 1945 when Berlin lay in rubble.

It doesn’t matter whether Middle Easterners actually accept the tenets of bin Laden’s worldview — not if they think he is on the ascendancy, can bring them a sense of restored pride, and humiliate the Jews and the West on the cheap. Bin Laden is no more eccentric or impotent than Hitler was in the late 1920s.Yet if he can claim that his martyrs forced the United States out of Afghanistan and Iraq, toppled a petrol sheikdom or two, and acquired its wealth and influence — or if he got his hands on nuclear weapons and lorded it over appeasing Westerners — then he too, like the Fuhrer in the 1930s, will become untouchable. The same is true of Iran’s president Ahmadinejad.

Fifth, fascism springs from untruth and embraces lying. Hitler had contempt for those who believed him after Czechoslovakia. He broke every agreement from Munich to the Soviet non-aggression pact. So did the Japanese, who were sending their fleet to Pearl Harbor even as they talked of a new diplomatic breakthrough.

Al-Zawahiri in his writings spends an inordinate amount of effort excusing al Qaeda’s lies by referring to the Koranic notions of tactical dissimulation. We remember Arafat saying one thing in English and another in Arabic, and bin Laden denying responsibility for September 11 and then later boasting of it. Nothing a fascist says can be trusted, since all means are relegated to the ends of seeing their ideology reified. So too Islamic fascists, by any means necessary, will fib, and hedge for the cause of Islamism. Keep that in mind when considering Iran’s protestations about its “peaceful” nuclear aims.

We can argue whether the present-day Islamic fascists have the military means comparable to what was had in the past by Nazis, Fascists, and militarists — I think a dirty bomb is worth the entire Luftwaffe, one nuclear missile all the striking power of the Japanese imperial Navy — but there should be no argument over who they are and what they want. They are fascists of an Islamic sort, pure and simple.
 
And the least we can do is to call them that: after all, they earned it.
 

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGEyNjcyNzBjYTQ2MDM0ZGIzZjY5YjhhMzViYjdjNTA=

People make decisions for themselves Sirs, how can an idea be a "malignancy" that is "infecting" thousands of Muslims and Islamic sympathizers

When the idea is to kill anyone who isn't Muslim or happens to be an Israeli.  And with a continual thought process being instilled at birth, THAT spread becomes a malignancy

what is an Islamic sympathizer?

Someone that supports the above "idea".  Now you're not going to pull the dren that I'm referring to all Muslims now, are you??

I never said anything about concentration camps.

Will that's good, because it sure seemed to be getting steered in that direction, with the accusatory tone I was getting from you

You're advocating killing people taking up arms in the name of that cause, but I suggest you don't even know which terrorist groups support such a cause

Asked and answered already, Hamas, Hezbollah, AlQeada, Islamic Jihad, etc., etc., etc.  They all have a foundation, spearheaded by AlQeada, of killing non-muslims, especially Israelis, with the hope of establishing an Islamic based global governing body.  Albeit with their twisted form of Islam.  You know, the ones who have been publically pledging such as their goal.  They also appear to have no problem killing actual Muslims who don't share the same agenda. 

Apparently you ignored most of Domer's post.

No, I picked out the pertient point to it.  I'm not required to "take it or leave it"

So it is a "war" versus an idea. You've said so yourself.

Not quite, but close.  It's a war vs the people that have that idea

An idea that very few people have.

Bzzzzzz, wrong again.  It's a malignancy that already infects thousands upon thousands of Muslims and Islamic sympathizers.  But just in case you were about to pull some hyperbolic charge, I'm not advocating concentration camps for people that think that way.  I'm advocating taking out as many as possible the ones who've actually taken up arms in that cause, and actively planning attacks against our way of life, in the name of that idea.   See the difference?

Ridiculousness aside Sirs, you cannot even properly identify the enemy in your war.

Actually I can.  They are the folks, who in the name of Islam, have pledged to kill any non-muslim who doesn't convert, to rid the region of any influence of Western Civilization, and to build a global governing body based on their mutated version of Islam

See, not so hard, is it

Domer did hit a pertinent point that the truest analogy is that of a cancer.  One that continues to spread, and one that left unchecked will.......well history has taught us once.  We'll have to see if we learned our lesson the 1st go around.  So far, Anti-war and anti-Bush folks aside, we are doing a better job this go around of identifying the threat EARLY, vs waiting for it to become an imminent global power

Sept 11th was simply a wake up call.  Seems some folks still keep wanting to hit the snooze button.

As for "torture", and legal rights Sirs. The first word you need to define and with a real definition, not something a third grader might use, is "war."

I know the definitions of both.  I just wish the anti-war folks would apply them appropriately.  Being made to listen to loud music isn't torture.  Being made to NOT get the daily required 8 hours of sleep is not torture.  Being humiliated is NOT torture.  And taking prisoners during a time of war, does not translate into requiring automatic legal representation nor full geneva convention protections if the enemy has chosen not to abide by the requirements of being protected by them

If you missed the "declaration", just go back to when Congress gave Bush full authority to go after our enemy.  When they decide to represent a specific country, then perhaps you'll see a formal declaration.  And we're at war against an enemy that'd like to see us all dead.  At leat that's what they've sayed publically.

The "hillarious" part is how you keep trying to lay claim of how abusive Bush and our military is, trying to compare them to the terrorists, all in polar opposite of the facts.  Suffice to say, if I were President, we'd be a whole hell of a lot harder on interrogating prisoners, stopping short at the infliction of fractures, dislocations, & dismemberment

The guys that might actually be guilty of that particular crime are going to be put on trial.
The guys that captured some Americans almost certainly abused prisoners that were innocent

BINGO.  Now, will Tee or Lanya catch on to this concept, yet?