Islamo-Fascism Denial

Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com
10/23/2007

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.

The witch-hunt involves fringe groups such as the Revolutionary Communist Party. It also involves groups embedded in the heart of our political process such as Campus Progress –a campus project funded by the Center for American Progress, an operation created by George Soros and Hillary Clinton and run by Bill Clinton's former chief of staff John Podesta. The group has put up a "kit" for attacking Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. In the literature, David Horowitz is described as a "racist" -- the standard label the Left attaches to anyone with whom it disagrees. The literature claims -- ludicrously -- that Horowitz has said that slavery was good for blacks. Of course Horowitz has never said any such thing. Campus Progress is distorting the meaning behind Horowitz's campaign against a proposal to have people who were not slaveowners pay reparations to people who were not slaves, and to do so 137 years after slavery was abolished. And what he said about reparations can be read here. In any case, none of this has anything to do with Islamo-Fascism -- or contradicting any of the evidence exposing the evil that it creates. This assault on Horowitz and Islamo-Fascism Awareness show how dependent the Left -- and now the Muslim groups with which it has formed an unholy alliance -- has become on the tactic of assaulting a political opponent's character to direct the discussion away from a truth that it cannot deny.

Now the MSA West Packet imitates this dependence on slander and deception. The packet takes issue with the term “Islamo-Fascism” itself. “Islamofascism,” we’re told, “is a term coined by neo-conservatives. According to neo-conservatives, Islamofascists are Muslims (hence the word ‘Islam’) who seek to rule the world under a totalitarian, oppressive regime (hence the word ‘fascists’.) Such diverse people and groups like Saddam Hussein (a secularist), Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran are labeled Islamofascists….According to the proponents of Islamofascism Week, such groups pose a threat to the United States. They link these groups by stating such groups want to dominate the world under an oppressive ‘caliphate’. This accusation has no basis whatsoever.”
Really? Let’s see.

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, prouncounced 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.

In terms of the specific terrorist groups and entities mentioned in the MSA packet, all of them -- along with many others -- have indeed made clear that they wish to destroy the United States and dominate the world under an oppressive caliphate – that is, a unified Islamic state ruled by Islamic Sharia law:
· Al-Qaeda: Osama bin Laden has said that the 9/11 attacks strengthened the Muslims, “which is a very good sign and a great step towards the unity of Muslims and establishing the Righteous Islamic Khilafah [caliphate] insha-Allah [Allah willing].” His second-in-command, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, has declared: “The war with Israel is not about a treaty, a cease-fire agreement, Sykes-Picot borders, national zeal, or disputed borders. It is rather a jihad for the sake of God until the religion of God is established. It is jihad for the liberation of Palestine, all Palestine, as well as every land that was a home for Islam, from Andalusia to Iraq. The whole world is an open field for us.”
· Hamas: The Hamas Charter sets out its Islamic mission as global: “Its spatial dimension extends wherever on earth there are Muslims, who adopt Islam as their way of life; thus, it penetrates to the deepest reaches of the land and to the highest spheres of Heavens. . . . By virtue of the distribution of Muslims, who pursue the cause of the Hamas, all over the globe, and strive for its victory, for the reinforcement of its positions and for the encouragement of its Jihad, the Movement is a universal one.” Universal in what way? The Palestinian Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi exhorted believers in 2002 “Oh beloved, look to the East of the earth, find Japan and the ocean; look to the West of the earth, find [some] country and the ocean. Be assured that these will be owned by the Muslim nation, as the Hadith says . . . ‘from the ocean to the ocean.’”
· The Muslim Brotherhood: Its founder, Hasan Al-Banna, wrote that “it is a duty incumbent on every Muslim to struggle towards the aim of making every people Muslim and the whole world Islamic, so that the banner of Islam can flutter over the earth and the call of the Muezzin can resound in all the corners of the world: God is greatest [Allahu akbar]!” Despite recent claims to the contrary, there is no evidence that the Brotherhood has renounced this goal.
· Hezbollah: Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has made clear that he wishes to pose a threat to the United States: “Let the entire world hear me. Our hostility to the Great Satan is absolute.…I conclude my speech with the slogan that will continue to reverberate on all occasions so that nobody will think that we have weakened. Regardless of how the world has changed after 11 September, Death to America will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan: Death to America.”
· The Islamic Republic of Iran: While as a Shi’ite he does not wish to see the establishment of a caliphate, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad harbors similar dreams of Islamic domination. He said in 2005: “we will soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism and will breathe in the brilliant time of Islamic sovereignty over today’s world.”
And in terms of Saddam Hussein, suffice it to say that there was a reason he trained thousands of Islamic jihad terrorists from all over the Middle East at camps in Iraq over the four years preceding the U.S. invasion.
The Minaret of Freedom Institute of Bethesda, Maryland, also takes issue, in a paper entitled “Islamo-fascism or Neocon-fascism?,” with the term “Islamo-Fascism.” Neither MSA-West nor the Minaret of Freedom Institute mentions the 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.
If the MSA-West and the Minaret of Freedom are really opposed to the Islamic supremacist agenda advanced by jihadists today, they should end the denial and obfuscation manifest in their responses to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, and join with its sponsors in defending the human rights of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and others oppressed under Islamic Sharia today. Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is, after all, a defense of millions of Muslims who are being tortured, persecuted and murdered today by those whose deformed universe of ideas is fascist to the core.
One clue may be in the MSA’s own questionable record and associations: according to Discover the Networks, “MSA was named in a May 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum as one of the Brotherhood’s likeminded ‘organizations of our friends.’ These ‘friends’ -- which included also the Islamic Society of North America, the Islamic Circle of North America, the Muslim Arab Youth Association, the Islamic Association for Palestine, the United Association for Studies and Research, and the International Institute of Islamic Thought -- were identified by the Brotherhood as groups that could help teach Muslims ‘that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands ... so that ... God’s religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions.”
Moreover, according to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, “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.”
These words were not written by David Horowitz, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Michael Ledeen, former Sen. Rick Santorum, or any other so-called “Islamophobe” involved with Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, but by a purported “friend” of the MSA. If this is not really the MSA’s goal, now is the time for the organization to renounce it publicly and stand with the defenders of human rights who are speaking out during Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.

Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of seven books, eight monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Religion of Peace?.