Anyone with a grasp of history knows that “fascism” entails intense nationalism and collaboration with large corporations, both of which Islamists reject.

1)Islamists believe that the Umma, the worldwide muslim community, should be united into a single political entity – a new Caliphate…and new Muslim “Nation”. Therefore I think it is simplistic and somewhat misleading to say that Islamists reject “Nationalism”. Yes, they do not have any strong loyalty to any existing nation-state. On the otherhand, their attitude towards the “Umma” does not strike me as fundamentally different from the attitude of a “UltraNationalist” towards his chosen nation.

I’m just an Agnostic/Atheist, so maybe I’m out of my league, but is “Nationalism” REALLY all that different from the glorification of any other abstract collective entity/idenitity? Is there really much difference between “My Nation uber-alles”, “My Race uber alles?”, and “My Religion uber alles”? Right now I think they are more alike than different.

2) Working with Large Corporations? Please correct me if I am wrong but I have always felt that this “aspect” of Facism was much less important in defining the character of the movement than the aspects like glorification of violence and brutality towads ‘enemies’, glorification of the collective over the individual, and the desire to recreate a glorious, mythical, past. Frankly, if a movement features all of those things I don’t think “failure to work with large corporations” is a good argument against calling it Fascist.

There ARE “problems” with the term Islamo-Fascist, but I think a lot of the criticisms of the term border on pendantic – confining themselves to point out minor techincal flaws based on very limited definitions of Fascism, while avoiding the two main questions: 1) “Do the similarities outnumber the differences”? and 2) “If Islamo-Fascist is too inaccurate, what would be a better term”?

See Dave Neiwert’s classic Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism which focusses on how the right deliberately destroys language by inverting or destroying the meaning of words. This is one of the ways in which they leave us tongue-tied, stammering and disarmed, while they rush forward in pushing their agenda. It’s a linguistic blitzkrieg, that has taken us years to come to terms with. We’re only now just figuring out this framing thing, for example, per George Lakoff. The right is lightyears beyond framing.

“IslamoFascist” sounds like a slick, artificial brand name, a neologism that just rolls off your tongue, with the right amount of sharpness and self-evident obviousness, put together with almost as much care as Toyota marketeers invented the word “Lexus” to describe their luxury division.

Anyone who hates fascism, and who hates this kind of linguistic manipulation should be calling the righties at every turn on this bogus conflation of words. If they steal our vocabulary for what’s going on, then we can’t talk about it, and it only exists, unarticulated in individual minds. It is an effective attempt to isolate members of the opposition, and the right has been successfully doing this for decades.