Charles Black, a longtime GOP consultant with close ties to both the first Bush administration and the current White House, said branding Islamic extremists as fascists is apt.

“It helps dramatize what we’re up against. They are not just some ragtag terrorists. They are people with a plan to take over the world and eliminate everybody except them,” Black said. ~AP

But “members” of Al Qaeda actually are some “ragtag terrorists.”  That they are not the Wehrmacht should not give anyone the impression that they are harmless or that they should be taken lightly.  It is the fact that they are not a monolithic, cohesive fighting force that gives them the advantage in asymmetric warfare.  They can still be villains without being a reincarnation of the SS.  Here is another reason why Islamofascist means nothing.  The word fascism conjures up images of storm troopers or well-organised corps of youth cadres, the fascisti themselves, beating up the odd communist or dissenter.  It does not conjure up images of the irregular mujahideen in the hills of Afghanistan, suicide bombers or religious fanatics.   

Now this world-domination stuff is, frankly, a lot of hot air.  They can plan to dominate the world all they like, just as Muslims have, in theory, hoped to bring the rule of Islam to the entire world, but to say that they want to dominate the world doesn’t make them fascist (nor does it mean that their plan to “dominate the world” has a chance of being realised). 

Communists wanted, in theory, to dominate the world, and they could appeal to people of all nations with a universalist ideology, which lent their plans for worldwide revolution more plausibility than any amount of rhetoric about the restoration of the Caliphate has (if this is the old Umayyad Caliphate of the early years we’re talking about, every Islamic revival movement for the last thousand years has wanted to “restore” this with no success).  But did their desire to dominate the world make them communofascists?  No, and people would call you a fool for saying things like this.  Why is it so hard to call the use of Islamofascist foolish? 

Alexander the Great certainly liked to conquer places, and perhaps if he had lived longer he would have dominated even more of the known world–would he have been a precocious Macedoniofascist?  The Mongols might have been said to have aspirations for something like global domination–was Genghis Khan a Mongolofascist?  Put that way, I would hope that intelligent people would see that this kind of cluttered, idiotic term not only does not define or describe who we are fighting but introduces layer upon layer of obfuscation and confusion. 

Why not use jihadi or jihadist?  If need be, we could expand it to Salafi jihadist, since many of the jihadists we’re really talking about are Salafists.  The Indians have gotten along for decades with the term jihadi, since it expresses very simply and concretely what these people are on about: waging jihad.  That necessarily emphasises their Islamic character, while avoiding all of the extremely stupid concoctions of propagandists.  It is the term that I normally use in my descriptions.  However, I believe describing our war as a war against all jihadis everywhere is a fundamental mistake.  Moreover, the war in Iraq is only marginally and accidentally connected with this in any case.  Our war is plainly not really or necessarily with Hizbullah or the ISF in Algeria or the Muslim Brotherhood, though this does not therefore mean that we should stupidly forge ahead in pressuring governments in the countries where these groups are found to include them in the “democratic” process.  It remains a war primarily and very specifically against Al Qaeda and its offshoots among Salafists and Wahhabis in the Near East and jihadists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  As a short, simple term, nothing beats jihadi.  Any word of abuse that takes thirteen letters to spell out is probably not a precise term in any case, or it more likely partakes of a fine old heresiological tradition of completely made-up names that may or may not have any relationship to the group being so labeled.  Among my favourites: Sabellioarian and Aphthartodocetist.  In heresiology, these terms become a necessary evil because there are literally no other terms available to describe the groups categorised by the clunky heresy labels.  In modern political discourse when we are talking about jihadis, we are not without alternatives.  Only the intellectually lazy, or propagandists or those inured to leftist habits of labeling all enemies as fascists could be satisfied with a term as clunky, inaccurate, ridiculous and all together misleading as Islamofascist or “Islamic fascist.” 

The questions every conservative should ask the Republican who barks Islamofascist at him are these: “Why fascist?  Why make the comparison with fascism?  Why do you, Republican, have this obsession with the word ‘fascist’ that seems more appropriate to a far-left liberal?  Could it be that you have adopted leftist categories of thinking in your quest to spread “democratic revolution”?  Can it be that all of this prattling about “ideological nations” has knocked a few screws loose and sent you into Soviet propaganda mode?”  Indeed, I have to wonder whether we will soon hear about Islamocounterrevolutionaries (try saying that one five times fast!) and Islamoenemiesofthepeople.  Conservatives should be very worried that this kind of language has become part of their lexicon and should be appalled at the people who have been propagating it, not just because it is inaccurate and sloppy, but because it betrays a strange affinity to old Marxist argumentation that was historically used as a means of distorting the truth about political enemies and Soviet policy.  This sort of rhetoric should not have any part in formulating U.S. foreign policy today.