More on "Islamo-Fascism"

Last week I discussed the emerging tempest over the use of the term "Islamo-fascist" to describe islamist terrorists. Over at The Plank, Spencer Ackerman echoes my discomfort and then some.:

I spent the last week in Dearborn, Michigan, home of the largest and oldest Muslim community in the United States, and I have a news flash: President Bush's recent formulation of the enemy in the war on terrorism as "Islamic Fascism," or, as it's more often known, "Islamofascism," is extremely offensive here. Practically everyone I've spoken with in Dearborn, from oncologists to students to clerics, brings up the term unprompted to explain how they feel themselves under collective suspicion from the Justice Department, a tone they feel Bush has set himself by using the phrase. You never hear the terms "Christian fascism," or "European fascism," goes the rejoinder, despite fascism's historical hijacking of Christian (actually atavistic paganism, more often) or ancient European iconography.

Last week in the Weekly Standard, the apparent inventor of the phrase, Stephen Schwartz, dismissed those who'd be offended by "Islamofascism" as "primitive Muslims." That should tell you all you need to know about those who use the term. I confess to using it, if ironically, in a recent piece, and here in Dearborn I learned precisely why you and I shouldn't. The people it infuriates aren't primitive. They're the moderate, pro-American, well-integrated Muslims who form one of the greatest bulwarks against Al Qaeda that the U.S. possesses, and they see the term as draining their Americanness away.

And for what? For a dubious linkage to a much different historical phenomenon? It doesn't diminish the crimes of the Taliban to observe that a Nazi would find Taliban-ruled Afghanistan unrecognizable. "Islamofascism" merely strokes an erogenous zone of the right wing, which gains pleasure from a juvenile reductio ad Hitlerum with the enemies of the U.S. Given my druthers, I'd call the enemy anti-Western Salafist jihadism. That may not roll off the tongue easily, but it has the advantage of relative precision.

We need to come up with another term. The more I think about it, I wonder if "Islamist" is not also too broad -- anything that appears, however inadvertantly, to stain an entire religion and an entire people is problematic and potentially dangerous. It certainly will not aid us in the crucial work of winning hearts and minds.