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Christopher Hitchens takes the time today to, as per the title of his piece, defend the term “Islamofascism”. In doing so, he lists any number of similarities, some relevant and some seemingly random or exaggerated, between the current Islamic extremists of the world and the 20th century European fascists. The writer makes a reasonable case for a comparison between the two, yet he leaves me decidedly unpersuaded when it comes to a compelling reason to accept the term as the most accurate available. The problem is painfully apparent in Hitchens’s conclusion:

This makes it permissible, it seems to me, to mention the two phenomena in the same breath and to suggest that they constitute comparable threats to civilization and civilized values.

[Emphasis added]

The problem, of course, lies with that second half of the equation. Hitchens provides examples of the similarities between the two movements’ goals and desired means (”Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind,” and, “Fascism (and Nazism) also attempted to counterfeit the then-success of the socialist movement by issuing pseudo-socialist and populist appeals”). But never once does he attempt to explain why “Islamofascism” poses an existential threat to civilization.

Look, if I get together with three friends and create a system of fascist beliefs and issue a bunch of vague declarations about what we’d do to the world if we gained power and all of those declarations bore a striking resemblance to Mussolini’s plans for Italy, we still wouldn’t be much of a threat to the existence of democracy. We’d just be a group of crackpots. The argument is not that “Islamofascism” bears no resemblance to fascism; it is that “Islamofascism” in its grandiosity has become a code word for those who believe the threat to be much greater than it is and hence requiring of endless ill-defined wars against Middle Eastern society more generally.

When Osama bin Laden starts making genuinely threatening moves to conquer a continent, maybe we should grant him the terrified respect we hold for the fascism of Nazi Germany. In the meantime, so long as we’re fighting a group of poorly organized nutjobs most of whose leadership is hiding in caves, we simply ask for a less grandiose- and accordingly more accurate- term for our enemies in this so-called war on terror. Hey, “Islamic extremist terrorists”- that seems to sum it up pretty well.

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