ANY WAY YOU SLICE THEM, YOU GET STATISM

Faith, Ideology, and Politics (David Forte, August 2003, John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs)

Many in the West think, or used to think, that the problem of violence in the Middle East lay within Islam itself. Jihad and Islam were, and are, seen as the same thing. There is no doubt that there is a strain of violence within Muslim culture, as there was a strain of violence within medieval culture, and within many tribal cultures. And my studies convince me that some elements of the legal tradition in Islam held by some particular writers can work to validate atavistic violence: the death penalty for apostasy, the prohibitions against blasphemy, the (otherwise normally appropriate) constraints on certain sexual activities, the approval of slavery, and the sometime legal degradation of religious minorities.

But what the recent bombing attacks in Israel and Baghdad show is that the enemy in the Middle East is not Islam, or at least the mainline tradition of Islam, but Fascism. The Baathists are overt Fascists, but so are Hamas and Hezbollah. Sometimes this brutal strain of Fascism wears an Islamic mask, but it is still in its essence the same kind of Fascist totalitarianism that ruined Europe, the same kind of Fascist/Communist totalitarianism that ruined Russia and China, and wounded Africa and Latin America. It is the Fascism that made the Holocaust in Europe and would do so again in the Middle East if it could.

The mask it wears, however, is important. In Germany, Fascism wore the mask of maintaining a rich cultural tradition, and seemed more valid because generations of intellectuals had accepted Social Darwinism. In Russia, Communism wore the mask of humanitarian concern for the worker and the poor, and it seemed more valid because generations of intellectuals had accepted the class dichotomies of Fabian Socialism and Progressivism. In the Middle East, Fascist terrorism tries to wear the mask of Islam, and it seems more valid to many because of its surface connection to a deeply held faith.

Considered simply as the idea that there should be an extremely powerful central State and that it should control every aspect of the nation's life, there really is no difference among Nazism, Communism, and Islamism Posted by Orrin Judd at August 26, 2003 7:46 PM