1-0 IN THE PROPAGANDA WAR !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Daanyeer]

How the right played the fascism card against Islam



Source: The Guardian
February 4, 2005 Author: Albert Scardino

Fascism is coming back into fashion, at least in the propaganda wars. For the right, it comes in the shape of a new word: "islamofascism". That conflates all the elements into one image: suicide bombs, kidnappings and the Qur'an; the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan; Iranian clerics and Hitler.

The term seems to have appeared first in the Washington Times in a reference to Islamist fundamentalists. Coined by Khalid Duran, a Muslim scholar seeking to explain Islam to Jews, the word was meant as a criticism of hyper-traditionalist clerics - who in turn denounced Duran as a traitor to the faith.

Usage has gathered momentum among commentators and academics who seek a verbal missile to debilitate those who disagree with them. They have adopted it as a sort of Judeo-Christian war cry - look for it soon in the title of a neo-conservative think tank conference.
For the left, the term "fascist" lost its power in the 1970s, when it was sprayed on every authority figure in sight, from the Nixon-Kissinger White House to university provosts to the neighbourhood cop.

To make Bush-Hitler comparisons work requires more nuanced historical references - to the night of the long knives, for example, as Sidney Blumenthal did about the dismissal of Colin Powell. Unfortunately for liberals, those references don't work as efficiently as islamofascism does for the right, because to imagine the appropriately creepy picture requires a familiarity with German history of the 1920s and 30s. Nazism is better known for its death camps than for Leni Riefenstahl or the Reichstag fire, so analogies between the Nazis' early years and current Republican party behaviour seem hollow, no matter how strong some parallels might be.

Christopher Hitchens, a former socialist who now sits on the other end of the political see-saw, sprinkles islamofascism about like paprika. He and Andrew Sullivan, a voice of the right, both wrongly receive credit in some quarters for coining the term.

Long before September 11 2001, Duran was commissioned by the American Jewish Committee to produce one side of an interfaith project. Duran responded to attacks on his book, Children of Abraham, by deriding those who sought "to impose religious orthodoxy on the state and the citizenry". In that sense, he said, extreme islamism is "islamofascism."

It took a couple of years for the word to seep into frequent usage. By then its meaning had expanded. Last year, Sullivan cited "five elements that make it particularly dangerous", including the "broken, medieval societies" that foster it, the "unquenchable extremism" of its motivation, and "the destructive technology" its adherents seek.

Use of the term to describe Muslim clerics and stateless terrorists has neatly pre-empted any chance of labelling Bush a fascist - no matter how many suspects are kidnapped by the US authorities and tortured; no matter how impervious the border; no matter how effective the use of propaganda to destroy the opposition; no matter how many countries are invaded on false pretenses; no matter how strongly a minority religion may become a mark of guilt.