Islamofascism

FrontPage Magazine

Muslim organizations are joining U.S. radical groups in mounting a national hate campaign against Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency has published an article denouncing the week, as have campus newspapers and organizations including the Socialist Workers Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party. And now MSA West, which describes itself as “an organization comprised of Muslim Student Associations (MSAs) representing campuses across the west coast,” has distributed a packet that it hopes will “serve the needs of MSA’s to intelligently and successfully confront IFAW.” The packet describes Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week as an “effort to curb critical thinking and academic freedom, spread racism and hate, and slander Islam and Muslims with lies and deception.”

This packet by MSA West and the growing effort to mobilize Muslim groups against an open, objective, and fair minded discussion of an Islamo-fascist ideology whose chief target is Muslims—Muslim women, gays, and free thinkers who become “infidels” the moment they question Islamic fundamentalism—shows exactly why Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week is necessary. By calling the effort to create a heightened awareness of Islamo-Fascism “racist,” these Muslim groups, and their hardcore radical allies, are attempting to invoke cloture on one of the most pressing issues of the day. They degrade real racism with their cynical charges as surely did those who formed a rhetorical lynch mob to hunt down the Duke lacrosse players. In trying to stifle Islamo-Fascism Awareness, they stifle free speech and free inquiry itself.

First things first: "Islamo-Fascism" has connections to fascism, as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, because “both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind.” Both are nostalgic for past glory, obsessed with real and imagined humiliations and thirsty for revenge, filled with anti-Semitism, and committed to sexual repression and its subordination of the female.

There is nothing artful or contrived in the term “Islamo-Fascism.” It is derived from history itself. Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood (from which today’s radical Muslim groups descend) was, after all, an open admirer and supporter of Adolf Hitler -- as was the principal theorist of the modern jihad, Sayyid Qutb. During World War II, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, cousin of Yasir Arafat and spiritual godfather of Palestinian nationalism, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, pronounced his pro-Nazi sympathies openly and proudly. In May 1941, he issued a fatwa calling upon the Germans to bomb Tel Aviv, and in November 1941 traveled to Berlin and met with Hitler. He implored the Nazi dictator to help implement a Final Solution in the Middle East. Then he went to the Balkans, where he spearheaded the creation of Muslim units of the Waffen SS.

Algerian sociologist Marieme Helie Lucas’s observation that the term “Islamo-Fascism” was “initially coined by Algerian people struggling for democracy, against armed fundamentalist forces decimating people in our country, then later operating in Europe, where a number of us had taken refuge.”

In other words, the term “Islamo-Fascism” originates with moderate Muslims under attack from Muslim hardliners, who murdered more than 150,000 Muslims whom they regarded as infidels in Algeria in the 1990s. The Minaret of Freedom declares that “Islam rejects the teachings of fascism because it is idolatry. Instead of worshipping God and receiving one’s moral guidance through the Qur’an and other revealed scriptures (the Torah, Psalms, Gospel, etc.), the fascist receives his or her moral guidance from the State and its leader.”

For what could be a more precise term to describe the codification of the moral guidance of the Qur’an into a totalitarian system that attempts to regulate an individual’s entire way of life, as the world has seen in the Iranian and Taliban regimes? Islamic Sharia law traditionally does indeed regulate an individual’s entire way of life; when this regulation becomes a matter for state enforcement, this is indeed fascist by the very definition used by the Minaret of Freedom.

“At the 7th annual MSA West Conference held at the University of Southern California in January 2005, a former MSA UCLA member, Ahmed Shama stated, ‘We want to restore Islam to the leadership of society...We are trying to establish that system of government, of Islamic governance, and to the helm of life in all walks of life. In short, we want to make the word of Allah (swt) supreme in every single aspect of life...The end goal of everything that we’re talking about is the reestablishment of the Islamic form of government...” He added: “The only justification -- the only justification -- that Muslims have to live in this country is da’wah. I say it again. It might be controversial...The only obligation that we have living in this country is da’wah...The end goal of everything I was talking about is the establishment of, the reestablishment of, Islamic form of government.”

Powered by ScribeFire.

Sphere: Related Content