Ron Paul Points the Way For Democrats in Congress

Kral, you should be ashamed of yourself. This decision will hector you for the rest of your life. We did not bring the war to the Mid East, they brought it to us. Read the 9/11 Report.

Dustin, you have cynicism to cloud your judgment. Who decapitated Danny Pearl and Nick Berg? Everyone talks about Bush torturing people. But you televised a grizzly murder? This stuff did not exist in 19th Century Islam, Dustin. It came about when scholars like Sayyid Qutb adopted fascism in its brand of Islam. Why else would Nasser have had Qutb killed? Where are the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood?

Think about it Dustin. If we withdrew from Iraq, like you want, do you think they are going to stop at Iraq? If we let them destroy Israel, do you think they will stop? Don’t you think they will want to come here? Look at my blog and check out State Representative Jonathan Paton’s post. There are thousands of stories like that.

They hate much like Nazis.
They are dedicated much like the Nazis.
They have come to believe much like the Nazis.

Their form of Islam demands that we surrender or convert. With more people like you who prevent us from fighting, we too be forced to that choice.

See you in a couple of months.

Fear is what allows Americans to spend countless countless dollars arms, weapons, and the like to fight in this case…a group with no real army. The cold war was over…we needed something new to be afraid of or we might actually start spending vast amounts of that treasure…the people’s money…on education and on engaging the world to be a better place.

Instead, we prefer to fight…as usual…and help spread whatever we call islamo-fascism by our deeds and our actions and our example.

Here is one defintion:

Islamofascism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamofascism

This article is about the term “Islamofascism”; See the broader treatment of possible relations between religion and fascism in Clerical fascism and Neofascism and religion.

Islamofascism is a controversial neologism suggesting an association of the ideological or operational characteristics of certain Islamist movements, with European fascist movements of the early 20th century, neofascist movements, or totalitarianism. Critics of the term argue that associating the religion of Islam with fascism is offensive and inaccurate.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Origins and usage
* 2 Examples of use in public discourse
* 3 Support
* 4 Criticism
o 4.1 Inbetween: Support of similarity
* 5 See also
* 6 References
* 7 External links
* 8 Further reading

[edit] Origins and usage

Although Islamofascism is usually a reference to Islamism or radical Islamism, rather than Islam in general, comparisons have been made between fascism and Islam, as far back as 1937, when the German Catholic emigré Edgar Alexander compared Nazism with “Mohammedanism”[citation needed], 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.”[1]

According to Roger Scruton, 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.”[2]

In 1990 Malise Ruthven wrote:

“Nevertheless there is what might be called a political problem affecting the Muslim world. In contrast to the heirs of some other non-Western traditions, including Hinduism, Shintoism and Buddhism, Islamic societies seem to have found it particularly hard to institutionalise divergences politically: authoritarian government, not to say Islamo-fascism, is the rule rather than the exception from Morocco to Pakistan.” [3]

Albert Scardino attributes the term to an article by Muslim scholar Khalid Duran in the Washington Times, where he used it to describe the push by some Islamist clerics to “impose religious orthodoxy on the state and the citizenry”.[4]

The related term, Islamic fascism, was adopted by journalists including Stephen Schwartz[5] and Christopher Hitchens,[6] who intended it to refer to Islamist extremists, including terrorist groups such as al Qaeda, although he more often tends to use the phrases “theocratic fascism” or “fascism with an Islamic face” (a play on Susan Sontag’s phrase “fascism with a human face”, referring to the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981). [7] The terms Islamic fascism and Muslim fascism are used by the French philosopher Michel Onfray, an outspoken atheist and antireligionist, who notes in his Atheist Manifesto that Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution “gave birth to an authentic Muslim fascism”.[8]

Some commentators[attribution needed] including Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens, believe there are similarities between historical fascism and Islamofascism:[9][page # needed]

* rage against historical humiliation; [10]
* inspiration from what is believed to be an earlier golden age (one or more of the first few Caliphates in the case of Islamism)[11][6];
* a desire to restore the perceived glory of this age — or “a fanatical determination to get on top of history after being underfoot for so many generations”[10] — with an all-encompassing (totalitarian) social, political, economic system;[5]
* belief that malicious, predatory alien forces (Jews in the case of Nazi Fascists or Islamofascists) are conspiring against and within the nation/community, and that violence is necessary to defeat and expel these forces; [6]
* exaltation of death and destruction along with a contempt for “art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence”, and strong commitment to sexual repression and subordination of women.[6]
* offensive military, (or at least armed) campaign to reestablish the power and allegedly rightful international domination of the nation/community.[5]

The word is included in the New Oxford American Dictionary, defining it as “a controversial term equating some modern Islamic movements with the European fascist movements of the early twentieth century”.[citation needed]

[edit] Examples of use in public discourse

The following are examples of use of the term:

* “In the wake of July’s London transport bombings by home-grown British Islamists, the dangers of mistaking one type of Muslim community for another have become obvious. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government has gone from ignoring Islamofascists in its midst — if not actually accommodating their efforts to proselytize and recruit in Britain — to cracking down forcefully on their activities and presence in the United Kingdom.” [12]— Frank J. Gaffney

* “What we have to understand is … this is not really a war against terrorism, this is not really a war against al Qaeda, this is a war against movements and ideologies that are jihadist, that are Islamofascists, that aim to destroy the Western world.”[13] — Clifford May

* “Islamic terrorist attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane. Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism. Whatever it’s called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam. This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: the establishment, by terrorism and subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom.”[14] — George W. Bush

[edit] Support

American author and Nixon speechwriter William Safire writes, “Islamofascism may have legs: the compound defines those terrorists who profess a religious mission while embracing totalitarian methods and helps separate them from devout Muslims who want no part of terrorist means.”[15]

In his book Terror and Liberalism, New York University journalism Professor Paul Berman “carefully teased out the intellectual origins of Islamic fundamentalism, looking primarily at Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual godfather of al-Qaeda. It was not hard to find the links: Qutb was explicitly and openly influenced by European fascism. Nor was this a merely intellectual influence: when his ideas eventually became a state ideology—in Taliban Afghanistan—it looked hideously familiar to historians of fascism, with its fanatical Jew-hatred, homophobia, misogyny, the banning of all dissent (and even of music), and the suppression of all liberal freedoms. Jihadists even inherited the most eccentric lacunae of fascist conspiracy-thought: on March 9, 2004, a meeting of Freemasons in an Istanbul restaurant was blown up by Islamist suicide-murderers.”[16]

Matthias Küntzel is a Hamburg-based political scientist and a research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In his book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, he traces the impact of European fascism on the Arab and Islamic world, drawing parallels between ancient prejudice and modern radicalism.[17] In an essay excerpted from his book, he writes,

“Despite common misconceptions, Islamism was born not during the 1960s but during the 1930s. Its rise was inspired not by the failure of Nasserism but by the rise of Nazism, and prior to 1951 all its campaigns were directed not against colonialism but against the Jews…Not to confront the ideological roots of Islamism–notably its well-documented connection to Nazi Jew-hatred–stymies any Western push for political, economic, and cultural modernization in the Muslim world. Yet only such modernization can split the majority of Muslims, who would benefit from social progress, from the Islamists, who are willing to die to prevent it. Without challenging the ideological roots of Islamism, it is impossible to confront the Muslim world with the real choices before it: Will it choose life and hope, or does it prefer the cult of death? Will it stand up for individual and social self-determination, or will it finally submit to the mullahs’ program of Jew-hatred and jihad?” [18]

Norman Podhoretz, who received the Guardian of Zion Award from Bar-Ilan University, argues in his book World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism that the current struggle is an ideological conflict against a totalitaritan idea.[citation needed]

[edit] Criticism

Critics have argued that grouping disparate ideologies into one single idea of “Islamofascism” may lead to an oversimplification of the causes of terrorism. Cultural historian Richard Webster says

“The idea that there is some kind of autonomous “Islamofascism” that can be crushed, or that the west may defend itself against the terrorists who threaten it by cultivating that eagerness to kill militant Muslims which Christopher Hitchens urges upon us, is a dangerous delusion. The symptoms that have led some to apply the label of “Islamofascism” are not reasons to forget root causes. They are reasons for us to examine even more carefully what those root causes actually are.”

He adds “‘Saddam, Arafat and the Saudis hate the Jews and want to see them destroyed’ . . . or so says the right-wing writer Andrew Sullivan. And he has a point. Does the western left really grasp the extent of anti-Semitism in the Middle East? But does the right grasp the role of Europeans in creating such hatred?”[19]

The use of the term “Islamofascist” by proponents of the War on Terror has prompted critics such as Joseph Sobran and Richard Allan Greene to argue that the term is a typical example of wartime propaganda.

Newspaper columnist Joseph Sobran has said

Islamofascism is nothing but an empty propaganda term. And wartime propaganda is usually, if not always, crafted to produce hysteria, the destruction of any sense of proportion. Such words, undefined and unmeasured, are used by people more interested in making us lose our heads than in keeping their own.”[20][21]

In the aftermath of the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot, George Bush described the fight against terrorists as a battle against “Islamic fascists… [who] will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom”. The Council on American-Islamic Relations wrote to him to complain, saying that the use of the term “feeds the perception that the war on terror is actually a war on Islam”.[22]

Security expert Daniel Benjamin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies claims the term was meaningless. “There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology as it was developed by Mussolini or anyone else who was associated with the term,” he said.[22]

American journalist Eric Margolis agreed: “There is nothing in any part of the Muslim World that resembles the corporate fascist states of western history. In fact, clan and tribal-based traditional Islamic society, with its fragmented power structures, local loyalties, and consensus decision-making, is about as far as possible from western industrial state fascism. The Muslim World is replete with brutal dictatorships, feudal monarchies, and corrupt military-run states, but none of these regimes, however deplorable, fits the standard definition of fascism. Most, in fact, are America’s allies.”[23]

The head of the Islamic Society of North America, Ingrid Mattson, said that recasting the war on terrorism as “a war against Islamic fascism” by U.S. President George W. Bush and other Republicans was inaccurate and added to a misunderstanding of the religion. Mattson did acknowledge, however, that terrorist groups “do misuse and use Islamic concepts and terms to justify their violence.”[24]

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman remarked that

“…there 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.”[25]

Conservative British historian Niall Ferguson states that:

…what we see at the moment is an attempt to interpret our present predicament in a rather caricatured World War II idiom. I mean, “Islamofascism” illustrates the point well, because it’s a completely misleading concept. In fact, there’s virtually no overlap between the ideology of al Qaeda and fascism. It’s just a way of making us feel that we’re the “greatest generation” fighting another World War, like the war our fathers and grandfathers fought. You’re translating a crisis symbolized by 9/11 into a sort of pseudo World War II. So, 9/11 becomes Pearl Harbor and then you go after the bad guys who are the fascists, and if you don’t support us, then you must be an appeaser. [26]

In 2007, conservative academic David Horowitz launched a series of lectures and protests on college campuses under the title of “Islamofascism Awareness Week” which at least 40 campuses moved to distance themselves from.[27] In response to the lectures and protests, The Muslim Student Group at Penn State University said it feared “that this Islamophobic program will have hazardous consequences on the Penn State community.”[28]

Norman Finkelstein considers the term to be meaningless, arguing that it is ‘a throwback to when juvenile leftists, myself among them, labeled everyone we disagreed with a ‘fascist pig’.'[29]

The left-wing National Security Network argues in a report that the term dangerously obscures important distinctions and differences between groups of Islamic extremists. The report also asserts that the term “creates the perception that the United States is fighting a religious war against Islam, thus alienating moderate voices in the region who would be willing to work with America towards common goals.” The report argues that “dividing these groups and dealing with them separately is a far better policy than lumping them together.”[30]

[edit] Inbetween: Support of similarity

Author Malise Ruthven opposes redefining Islamism as `Islamofascism`, but also finds the resemblances between the two ideologies “compelling,” both embracing spirituality and rejecting reason. He compares Islamism first to Marxism but then comments:

… the fascist parallels go deeper than the Marxist ones. In his explicit hostility to reason (alluded to in the reference to Ahmad ibn Hanbal’s struggle against the Mu’tazilite doctrine of the `created` Quran) it is not Marx, grandchild of the Enlightenment, but Nietzsche, an anti-rationalist like the anti-Mu’tazilite al-Ash’ari, whom `Azzam echoes. The attachment to the lost lands of Palestine, Bukhara and Spain (unlike a rational and humane concern for Palestinian rights) is, like Mussolini’s evocations of Ancient Rome, nostalgic in its irredentism, its `obliteration of history from politics` The invocation of religion is consistent with the way fascism and Nazism used mythical modes of thought to mobilize unconscious or psychic forces in the pursuit of power, a task made easier in a population sanctified by a millennium of Islamic religious programming. Georges Sorel, sometimes seen as the intellectual father of fascism, declared that `use must be made of a body of images which, by intuition alone, and before any considered analyses are made, is capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism.` Mussolini, to whom Sorel in his later years lent his support, saw fascism as `a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and raise him to conscious membership of a spiritual society`. [31] In the same line of thinking Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue, stressed the other-worldly, spiritual aspect of Hitler’s racial theories: `The life of a race does not represent a logically-developed philosophy nor even the unfolding of a pattern according to natural law, but rather the development of a mystical synthesis, an activity of soul, which cannot be explained rationally.`[32]

[edit] See also

* Eurabia
* Islamism
* Islamic fundamentalism
* Neo-fascism and religion
* Islamist terrorism
* Islamophobia
* Clerical fascism
* Haghani Circle

* Islamic State
* Theocracy
* Fascism
* Neofascism
* Fascist (epithet)
* Dave Emory
* Talibanization
* Al-Qaedaism

[edit] References

1. ^ Religious Fundamentalism and Political Extremism (2003-03-04). Retrieved on 2007-02-27. Citing The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 10 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p.281
2. ^ Scruton, Roger. “‘Islamofascism’ – Beware of a religion without irony.”, OpinionJournal.com, August 20, 2006.
3. ^ “Construing Islam as a language”, by Malise Ruthven, The Independent, September 8, 1990
4. ^ Scardino, Albert. 1-0 in the propaganda war. The Guardian. Retrieved on 2006-04-19.
5. ^ a b c Schwartz, Stephen. What Is ‘Islamofascism’?. TCS Daily. Retrieved on 2006-09-14.
6. ^ a b c d Hitchens, Christopher: Defending Islamofascism: It’s a valid term. Here’s why, Slate, 2007-10-22
7. ^ William Safire (2006). “Islamofascism Anyone?” International Herald Tribune, Opinion-Editorial. Retrieved August 28, 2007
8. ^ Michel Onfray: Atheist manifesto. The case against Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Carlton, Vic. 2007, pp. 206-213.
9. ^ Berman, Paul (2003). Terror and Liberalism. W W Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-05775-5.
10. ^ a b Wright, Lawrence, Looming Tower, Knopf 2006, p.306
11. ^ Manfred Halpern, Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa. Princeton University Press, 1963 quoted in [1]
12. ^ Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.. “Don’t go there, Mrs. Hughes”, Jewish World Review, August 30, 2005. Retrieved on 2007-06-28.
13. ^ Clifford May (October 12, 2004). News from CNN with Wolf Blitzer. CNN News Transcript. Retrieved on 2007-06-28.
14. ^ President Discusses War on Terror at National Endowment for Democracy. Retrieved on 2006-04-19.
15. ^ William Safire: Islamofascism, The New York Times, October 1, 2006
16. ^ http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=868
17. ^ http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=3330
18. ^ http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=14080&R=114FFE17
19. ^ Richard Webster. Israel, Palestine and the tiger of terrorism: anti-semitism and history. New Statesman. Retrieved on 2007-06-28.
20. ^ Sobran, Joe. Words in Wartime. Retrieved on 2006-04-18.
21. ^ Rall, Ted. Bush’s war on history and to…toma…tomatotarianism. Retrieved on 2007-07-28.
22. ^ a b Richard Allen Greene. “Bush’s language angers US Muslims”, 12 August 2006. Retrieved on 2007-06-28.
23. ^ Eric Margolis (August 2006). The Big Lie About ‘Islamic Fascism’. Retrieved on 2007-07-28.
24. ^ U.S. Muslim group’s head says Bush’s term ‘Islamic fascism’ adds to misunderstanding of Islam. The Associated Press (September 1, 2006). Retrieved on 2007-06-28.
25. ^ Paul Krugman. Fearing Fear Itself. New York Times. Retrieved on 2007-10-29.
26. ^ Niall Ferguson Interview: Conversations with History). Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley (2006). Retrieved on 2007-10-12.
27. ^ U. disavows ties to Horowitz’s program
28. ^ Muslim Student Association’s Response to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (IFAW)
29. ^ Wajahat Ali, ‘An Interview with Norman Finkelstein’
30. ^ Report: ‘Islamofascism’ blinds U.S.
31. ^ ([sources: Benito Mussolini, `The Doctrine of Fascism` (1932), in Adrian Lyttleton, Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile, (London 1973)]
32. ^ A Fury For God, Malise Ruthven, Granta, 2002, p.207-8

[edit] External links

* Walter Laqueur. The Origins of Fascism: Islamic Fascism, Islamophobia, Antisemitism, Oxford University Press blog.

[edit] Further reading

* Ignatius, David. “Toward a Definition of ‘Islamic Fascism'”, Daily Star (Lebanon), August 19, 2006
* Marty, Martin. “Irony and Islamofascism”, Christian Post, August 21, 2006.
* Nunberg, Geoffrey. ‘”Islamo-Creeps’ Would Be More Accurate”, L.A. Times, August 17, 2006
* Nyquist, J.R. “Islam and Fascism”.
* Podhoretz, Norman. World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. New York: Doubleday, 2007.
* Pollitt, Katha. “Wrong War, Wrong Word”, The Nation, August 24, 2006.
* Scardino, Albert. “1-0 in the propaganda war”, The Guardian, February 4, 2005.
* Sullivan, Andrew. ‘Interview’ (satire) from INDC Journal

It’s a way of smearing all Muslims and transferring the label ‘fascist’ to an enemy, when it is most properly used to describe movement conservatives. In other words, it has no meaning; only a rhetorical purpose.

And I do have wartime experience — as a draft dodger.

Its an interesting point and unlike most of your entries there are some facts behind it. But unfortunately it lacks one key ingredient that McCain and Paul have that most of your leaders don’t have credibility. Credibility comes from moral authority and that comes from experience and let’s face it, most of your people don’t have military and specifically military wartime experience.

Ronald Reagan said in 1964 in his Speech “A Time for Choosing” the following:

We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.”

Arizonans, the same choice offered by the Soviets, we face today from the Islamo-fascists.