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Language: Islamofascism, anyone? - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune

WASHINGTON —

Every war is entitled to a name. World War II was a warmed- over name, and the Korean conflict was not at first even given the name of "war," which Vietnam rated until it was overtaken by "syndrome." And not until 1947 was America's intense but not-hot war against the Soviet Union named - in a speech by Bernard Baruch, written by Herbert Bayard Swope - the Cold War.

America is now engaged in what many like to call "the long war," which may turn out to be its name in history unless good fortune shortens it. But more important than the name of the war - at least to the people fighting and supporting it - is the name of the enemy. To allow an enemy to remain nameless is to grant it the propaganda advantage of eternal mystery.

Accordingly, President George W. Bush and his legion of the resolved tried out "war on terror." But that was derivative ("war on poverty," "war on drugs"), and terror was the method used by the enemy, not the enemy itself - an amorphous idea of intimidation rather than a specific, belligerent nation or a hostile people.

What rallying title to use? Not the "Iraqi war"; the elected Iraqi government is on our side. The "war on Saddam" is over, and the "war on bin Laden" would only build up a TV ghost. The "war on Islam"? No; we're not fighting a whole religion. Bush tried narrowing that to "Islamic radicals," but that formulation was denounced by Democratic senators and nonradical Muslims.

"There was a conscious desire not to use just one definitive word," said Michael Gerson, until last year the president's chief speechwriter, now a Newsweek columnist, "because there wasn't a perfect word."

Bush has been sensitive from the first days after 9/11 to the wrong of tarring the vast majority of Muslims with guilt-by-association rhetoric. In straining to be fair, however, he set out a few suggested labels but declined to choose: "Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant jihadism; still others, Islamofascism. Whatever it's called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam."

Islamofascism treats the opening Islam as the specifying modifier for the dominant noun, the repugnant ideology of fascism.

What's a fascist? In 1922, the Italian politician Benito Mussolini turned to a symbol of the ancient Roman imperium, the fasces, which the Penn State professor of classics Daniel Berman informs me was "a bundle" of birch rods and an ax standing for penal authority. Il Duce's Partito Nazionale Fascista stood for militarism, social elitism and fierce nationalism, combined with contempt for democracy and anger at the rise of Communism.

But in current usage, fascism is remembered less as an ideology than as a dictatorship employing violent repression at home and military aggression abroad. Because of its anti-Communist beginnings, the intolerant "axis" of Rome and Berlin, and later Tokyo, is semantically associated with ultraconservativism. The imprecation fascist has been more often flung at the far right by the extreme left than vice versa.

That's been changing in recent years. Fascism is not so much taken to be a left or right political ideology; rather, it has become a word defining hate-based practices employed by a totalitarian regime or movement - bundling such punishing birch- whip words as "dictatorial," "bigoted," "jack-booted," "racist," "sexist," "power-famished."

A popularizer of "Islamofascism" has been Christopher Hitchens, who writes for The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair and Slate. He declines coinage credit, informing me that he wrote that the 9/11 attacks represented "fascism with an Islamic face," (a play on Susan Sontag's phrase about the Polish coup of 1981, "fascism with a human face," in turn based on the 1968 "Prague spring" theme, "Communism with a human face"). The first use I can find is in The Independent of Sept. 8, 1990: "Authoritarian government, not to say 'Islamo- fascism,'" wrote Malise Ruthven, "is the rule rather than the exception from Morocco to Pakistan."

The Oxford English Dictionary has a half-dozen citations of the Islamo combining form dating to 1906, from IslamoArab to Islamocentrist. Why the connective "o" and not a divisive "ic"? Euphony; the Greek construction flows more easily. That's why Islamofascism may have legs: The compound defines those terrorists who profess a religious mission while embracing totalitarian methods and helps separate them from devout Muslims who want no part of terrorist means.

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