printBAB’s Guest Blogger, Lawrence Auster, inveighs against the “Islamist” and the “Islamofascist” appellations:
“… And I’m Not Taking it Anymore” By Lawrence Auster at View from the Right
What’s the point of politeness when we are suffocating in lies? Here’s an e-mail I’ve sent to the Bush guys at Powerline:
You write: “I confess that I hadn’t realized the extent to which Islamists have terrorized Bangladesh.”
Among the jihadist Muslims whom we’re concerned about, can you please point to any who describe themselves as “Islamists”? If you can’t, then please have the simple intellectual honesty to stop using a term that does not describe anyone in the world.
When we opposed Nazism, there was a Nazi party that was running Nazi Germany. When we opposed Communism, there was a Communist party that controlled the Soviet Union and half of Europe. BUT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS “ISLAMISM” AS DISTINCT FROM ISLAM. “Islamism,” in the sense of something different from Islam, is a term made up BY Westerners FOR Westerners to avoid speaking the ugly truth about ISLAM, because they are afraid that if they speak the truth, they won’t be able to think of themselves as “nice,” “tolerant” people anymore. They are afraid that the West would actually have to defend itself against its mortal enemy, instead of playing footsie with it.
As long as you guys are so dependent on transparently false euphemisms such as “Islamism,” you should not call yourselves “Power Line.” You should call yourselves “Fear Line,” as in AFRAID TO SPEAK THE TRUTH.
Lawrence Auster
Readers who are as fed up as I am with “Islamist” can do something about it. Every time you see some columnist say, “Islamist,” write to him or her and ask (you don’t have to be confrontational the way I was with Powerline): “Among the Muslims who are waging jihad on us, can you please indicate any movement or organization or party or religious body that calls itself ‘Islamist’? If you can’t, then why do you call people ‘Islamists’ who don’t call themselves that?” If enough people wrote such letters, we could drive this phony word out of our public discourse. The same goes for the even more ludicrous term, “Islamofascist.”
To be clear on this, it is true that various Muslims occasionally refer to themselves as “Islamists,” in the generic sense of someone who believes in Islam and thinks that it is important, just as a person who believes strongly in democracy is a democratist. But in the Muslims’ own usage, there is no particular connection between the word “slamist” and jihadist, violent Islam.
Mark D. adds:
You’re quite right, the use of “Islamist” is absurd.
The use of the word is not intended to describe any reality outside the speaker; rather, it’s a projection of the [liberal] speaker’s need to preserve his illusion that “Islam is a religion of peace,” or in general that all religions and all cultures are alike [i.e., liberal at heart].
To a liberal, there is no such thing as an alien, or an alien culture, or an alien religion. Quite simply, to preserve his liberalism, a liberal must deny the very concept of “alien.” Thus, we hear the mantra, even from Republicans, that “we are a nation of immigrants,” which is a clever, manipulative way to package the maxim that there is no such thing as an alien.
Within the liberal understanding of the world and human nature, the very notion of “alien” is an immoral subjective judgment of the speaker/thinker that reveals deep fascistic tendencies that can only lead to genocide. To a liberal, the term “alien” expresses, in language, the will to power to dominate and even exterminate the “Other,” and is therefore politically and morally illegitimate.
The result is that, in relation to the Western liberal world, there are no aliens, no alien cultures, nor any alien religions. To even entertain the notion that such things exist is apostasy, and reveals a deep streak of fascistic genocidal tendencies [“You’re a Nazi!”].
To the liberal West, in assessing Islam and its terrorists, there can only be madmen, anti-social exiles from the peaceful center of Islam, fanatics and lunatics and desperate “victims.” Hence, the invention of the liberal term, “the Islamists,” who have “hijacked” Islam to express their perverse ambitions or their “radicalism” or their “desperation.” This understanding then leads to various liberal policy responses: In the case of John Kerry, Islamic terrorism is a law enforcement issue, and to George Bush Islamic terrorism is a symptom of social and political deprivation. Both of these policy responses stem from the same liberal understanding.
The right-liberals [i.e., conservatives] are most egregious in this use of “Islamist.” I suppose they fear if they spoke according to facts and the proven record, they would be accused of “racism,” or “bigotry,” etc., just as they were so accused during the Dubai Ports fiasco. And who accused them of racism and profiling and bigotry? A Republican administration!
In this case, one small word—Islamist—is a reflection of the entire liberal worldview, and the increasingly bizarre mental straightjacket imposed by that worldview.