Know enemies, not slogans

Our military and domestic efforts to combat terrorism have been described in many ways – war… Our military and domestic efforts to combat terrorism have been described in many ways – war with Islamic radicalism, war on terror, war against jihadism. The list goes on and on and shows just how ill-defined our enemies really are. And, recently, our many foes acquired newer, more frightening terminology – terminology that can further oversimplify the entire Middle Eastern malevolence in two apocalyptic words.

“Islamic Fascism” is the phrase President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and our very own Republican Sen. Rick Santorum have been using to refer to terrorism these days. The phrase seemed to appear out of nowhere, as if the numerous enemies we’re fighting suddenly transformed into one all-inclusive entity with radical Mussolini-esque goals overnight.

But this phrase serves as more than just added spice to the rhetoric of all our favorite politicians. “Islamic Fascism” distorts the many conflicts in which we are engaged when it comes to the Middle East. It demonstrates if anything, how little we know about our enemies, and it’s impossible to successfully fight opponents we do not understand.

The label is a blatant display of the nation’s growing us-vs.-them mentality, which stems from our ever-escalating apprehension and ignorance surrounding our enemies. We bunch up all the conflicts in the Middle East and cry “Islamic Fascism!”

Take the latest violent clashes between Israel and Lebanon, for example. This is a conflict that has been so warped underneath the umbrella of “Islamic Fascism” that many of us seem to have forgotten how and when it originally began. It is misleading to assume, as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby does, that Hezbollah’s recent actions are a “part and parcel of the radical Islamist jihad against the free world.”

The Israeli-Hezbollah dispute is not merely a component of the overall global war on terror. It is also not, as President Bush claims, a US-Iran proxy war, spurred to distract the Western world from Iran’s nuclear ambitions. This conflict has deep historical and political roots in the 1982 Lebanon War when Hezbollah was first formed to combat the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon. Oversimplifying terms like “Islamic Fascism” prevent all of this from being taken into consideration.

Not only that, the phrase suggests we are fighting people of one like-minded ideology who are working together to achieve a common goal. This prevents us from seeing the stark differences between them. And, trust me, the differences are plenty:

Saddam Hussein ran a secular dictatorship that was not based upon traditional Islamic law.

The Iraqi insurgency is made up of many independent guerilla groups each with separate goals.

Al-Qaeda forces and their infamous leader, Osama bin Laden, hold self-proclaimed fundamentalist motives to remove foreign influence in Islamic countries.

Hezbollah is a Shiite organization while Hamas is Sunni.

The human rights situation in Iran, a country that follows Islamic law, is more moderate than those of some other Middle Eastern countries, as women have the right to vote and hold public office.

The Taliban of Afghanistan was using an extreme interpretation of Islamic law to justify their poor standards of freedom.

Also, some are independent non-state terrorists, and some are nations with undemocratic governments and laws. Moreover, so many of these people we collectively label as “Islamic Fascists” are enemies with one another. It’s obvious “Islamic Fascism” is much too simplistic to serve as an accurate description for all of them.

Apart from all that, “Islamic Fascism” is an inaccurate historical analogy. For one thing, Italian Fascism and German Nazism of the early 1900s were prominently autocratic and secular movements with the main objective of creating large, dominant fascist states through the use of military conquest. Often, these fascists even collaborated with one another, whether to further their own individual aims or to gain more influence on an international level.

Furthermore, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were enemies we could pinpoint, with regimes and militaries that could be defined and targeted – we cannot say this about terrorists today, as they are unidentifiable, hazy individuals with goals that are often difficult to distinguish.

But what’s in a name? Maybe the phrase “Islamic Fascism” is just that – a phrase, and nothing more. Well, as unimportant as terminology may seem during the trying times of war, it nonetheless illustrates how much we know about our enemies and how we perceive them. In this case, it also propagates excessive fear and ignorance.

This is why “Islamic Fascism,” as a phrase, is almost as dangerous as the enemies it struggles to describe. And the only way we can protect ourselves is by taking a look behind its veiling curtain to see what truly lurks beneath our words.