Quite a lot, if it’s “Islamic fascism” and it’s President Bush who utters it. During an August 7th press conference at his Texas ranch, he said terrorists were trying “to spread their jihadist message—a message I call . . . Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism.” Seconds later, he added that “Islamofascism” was an “ideology that is real and profound.” Three days later, he said that America “is at war with Islamic fascists” and “Islamic fascists . . . will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom.”

His choice of words created quite a stir. As would be expected, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) objected, saying that “this is all ill-advised term and we believe that it is counterproductive to associate Islamic Muslims with fascism.”

The Left, which believes that it has ownership rights to using “fascism” to denigrate opponents, was up in arms. The Nation complained that, first, Islamofascism is “a terrible historical analogy,” as the inter-war European fascist movements, unlike today’s jihadis, were nationalist and secular and, second it “conflates many different states, movements and organizations as if, like the fascists, they all want similar things and are working together to achieve them.”

John Cox, in an article posted at the left-wing Common Dreams website, admitted that, because they each subscribe to “right-wing beliefs” and “favor violence” to achieve their goals, there may be a “superficial resemblance” between the European fascism of old and al-Qaeda and similar groups. But that’s where the similarities end. As did The Nation, he avers that Islamists are neither nationalists nor secularists and, therefore, aren’t fascists. Cox then adds what he thinks is another difference: that fascism, unlike Islamism, has always had a “modernizing thrust.”

For R.J. Eshow, Bush’s use of “Islamic fascism” is nothing more than a political ploy. In his Huffington Post article, he says that the term is “demonstrably inaccurate” in describing the threat we face. It’s been “ginned up to stifle any genuine debate” and for “partisan political gain.” Worse still, it “weakens us” by using a false historical analogy to “confuse us.”

More surprising than the Left’s reaction is that of Daniel Benjamin, who served on the staff of the National Security Council in the second Clinton Administration and is now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Consistent with the sentiments expressed in his recent book (The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right), he maintains that the term is meaningless:

    There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology as it was developed by Mussolini or anyone else . . . This is epithet, a way of arousing strong emotion and tarnishing one’s opponent, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the content of their beliefs.

Most surpising—or at least disturbing—is what Senator Russ Feingold said in his September 12 speech at the Arab American Institute:

    We must avoid using misleading and offensive terms that link Islam with those who subvert this great religion or who distort its teachings to justify terrorist activities. I call on the President to stop using the phrase “Islamic Fascists”, a label that doesn’t make any sense, and certainly doesn’t help our effort to fight terrorism. Fascist ideology doesn’t have anything to do with the way global terrorist networks think or operate, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world who practice the peaceful teachings of Islam. When the President of the United States uses that phrase, he offends peaceful Muslims around the world, and he shows that he doesn’t understand the enemies that we are up against. It’s obvious that the Administration made a deliberate decision to use this term. I believe that this is a serious mistake. It’s time for the President to repudiate this term and instruct people in his Administration to cease using it. What is so hard about referring to the enemy as Al Qaeda, its affiliates, and its sympathizers?

To put it nicely, the people and organizations that pounced upon Bush’s remarks are academically challenged. A less kind way of putting it is that they’re ideologically blinded.

Their dismissive attitudes contrast sharply with the facts and perspectives proffered by Martin Kramer and Michael Burleigh. Kramer is a Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Burleigh is a Fellow of the UK’s Royal Historical Society and the author of The Third Reich and Earthly Powers, both of which I heartily recommend.

While most of us—including yours truly—probably never laid our eyes on the phrase “Islamic fascism” until sometime after 9/11, Kramer documents the fact that it’s been in use for more than four decades. He begins by citing Manfred Halpern’s Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa, published in 1962. At the time, it was the only academic treatment of Islamism. Halpern called it “neo-Islamic totalitarianism,” and this is how he described it:

    The neo-Islamic totalitarian movements are essentially fascist movements. They concentrate on mobilizing passion and violence to enlarge the power of their charismatic leader and the solidarity of the movement. They view material progress primarily as a means for accumulating strength for political expansion, and entirely deny individual and social freedom. They champion the values and emotions of a heroic past, but repress all free critical analysis of either past roots or present problems . . . Like fascism, neo-Islamic totalitarianism represents the institutionalization of struggle, tension, and violence . . . Like fascist movements elsewhere, the movement is so organized as to make neo-Islamic totalitarianism the whole life of its members.

Kramer then quotes Maxime Rodinson, the preeminent French scholar of Islam in the 1970s. In a 1978 article in Le Monde discussing Islamic movements, Rodinson said

    . . . the dominant trend is a certain type of archaic fascism (type de fascisme archaïque). By this I mean a wish to establish an authoritarian and totalitarian state whose political police would brutally enforce the moral and social order. It would at the same time impose conformity to religious tradition as interpreted in the most conservative light.

Six years later, Said Amir Arjomand, an Iranian-American sociologist, pointed out

    . . . some striking sociological similarities between the contemporary Islamic movements and the European fascism and the American radical right . . . it is above all the strength of the monistic impulse and the pronounced political moralism of the Islamic traditionalist and fundamentalist movements which makes them akin to fascism and the radical right alike.

In 1986, Arjomand published an article in the journal World Politics that included these words:

    Like fascism, the Islamic revolutionary movement has offered a new synthesis of the political creeds it has violently attacked. And, like the fascists, the Islamic militants are against democracy because they consider liberal democracy a foreign model that provides avenues for free expression of alien influences and ideas.

Three days ago, The Times published a commentary by Michael Burleigh. It’s worth quoting at considerable length:

    Nothing much separates the horror that modern Islamists express towards western urban industrial society and the cultural pessimism that was pervasive on the European right in the late 19th century — the toxic pool from which fascism emerged in the aftermath of the great war.Most European fascist movements were products of visceral national grievance; a colossal sense of collective victimhood at the hands of the Israeli David or the western Goliath is also a key motivating force behind radical Islam.

    Interwar fascists believed in the purifying efficacy of political violence, glorified death and destruction and were contemptuous of liberal democracy and the rule of law. Radical Islamists may detest democracy for different reasons — as a form of blasphemy against Allah’s will rather than what elite fascists regarded as the politics of the mindless herd — but they share a similar nihilistic pleasure in chaos and destruction.

    Like fascists and communists, they are psychologically captive to one big idea and are equally willing to kill, or to die, for it. Their big idea is that Muslims should be on top rather than so manifestly powerless vis-à-vis the western world.

    Fascists believed in a politics of fall from a heavily mythologised paradisiacal past, casting themselves as the light that will dispel the darkness. “Germany awakes” is paralleled by the “blessed awakening” of all Muslims that tantalises Osama Bin Laden.

    Like radical Islamists, fascists were fascinated by modern technology, albeit tank and tractor factories rather than satellite phones, but the visions of greatness that animated them lay in the remote past: ancient Rome in the case of Mussolini, or the medieval Reich which Hitler promised to restore a third time, although he was also fascinated by prehistoric Aryans. Al-Qaeda is similarly driven by a desire to recreate a caliphate that existed 1,300 years ago.

There are some “contextual” differences, however:

    Militant Islamists are utterly murderous and viciously anti-semitic, but the heterogeneous ethnic composition of Al-Qaeda hardly suggests that visions of racial purity matter to it. In fact, Al-Qaeda is doing its best to recruit white and black people in order to outwit authorities looking for Arabs and Pakistanis.Fascism emerged as a form of “anti-politics” designed to bridge endemic conflicts between capital and labour. It favoured corporatist economics, in which employers and workers would be dragooned by the state. These doctrines have little bearing in economies of entrepreneurs and traders. Before his mafia-like Sudanese hosts stole his money in the late 1990s, Bin Laden was a (not very proficient) venture capitalist, ploughing his (modest) fortune into forlorn business endeavours to bankroll terrorism.

    More insurmountably, the rise of radical Islam since the late 1970s reflects the bankruptcy of the two dominant political creeds in the Arab world, nationalism and socialism, the two western movements that comprised fascism.

    Perhaps the biggest problem with using 20th-century political concepts to describe Islamist militants is that they want to cause the collapse of the artificial nation states that were established by tribal dynasts, or imposed by imperialists in the 1920s, into a caliphate stretching from southern Spain to northwest China. Most fascists in the 1930s were extreme nationalists, not people who wanted to abolish the nation state in favour of some larger ethnically mixed empire.

    Calling Islamist terrorists “Islamofascists” gets things only about half right, even when one reincorporates into “fascism” what it adapted from the Christian (and pagan) world view, rather than regarding it as a doctrine to defend the interests of the powerful.

    Since Islamist terrorism is the product of a pathological strain within a particular religious tradition, it is best to stick with terms derived from it, notably “jihadism”. Although apologists aver that jihad is akin to yoga, in fact it means fighting in the alleged interests of the Muslim community or umma. The equivalent of Jesuit casuistry enables jihadist clerics to rationalise killing innocents by labelling them infidel.”

Now that’s what I call an analysis. In my view, the similarities vastly outweigh the differences. If you object to “Islamic fascism,” then call Islamism “Islamic totalitarianism.” If that’s what you want to call it, recognize that it’s a totalitarianism of the right. And what to we call a totalitarianism of the right? Fascism.