A Note On Nomenclature

What, oh what, to call the Sunni Muslim terrorists? Lately I have settled on the unsatisfactory shorthand “Islamofascist.” There are clear problems with this.

Fascism originated as a violent reactionary response to Bolshevism and to economic crises of capitalism after World War One. It is really something capitalists resorted to in order to protect their economic interests, with had sometimes-unintended consequences for them. Later the U.S. encouraged it in Latin America, where it occurred natively during and after World War Two in military dictatorships like Argentina and Paraguay. (Both of which, incidentally, were havens for Nazi war criminals sent there by U.S. military “intelligence,” the CIA, and the Vatican. The Vatican in fact provided false documents for thousands of such mass murderers.)

The Sunni terrorists of the Al-Qaeda/Taliban/Pakistani persuasion obviously are different in this economic dimension. They are a religious-political movement. (Fascists of various stripes have been allied with Christian churches, in particular Roman Catholicism, but religious doctrine was not their motivation, nor claimed justification, nor were they attempting to spread religious doctrine.)

But if we speak of “Islamic terrorists,” that pushes us in the direction of painting Islam as terrorist per se. It elides the fact that we are talking about a particular Saudi-based sect (Wahhabism) of a branch of Islam (Sunnism). Also, most of the victims of their violence have been Muslims, which needs to be mentioned with sufficient frequency that people keep it in mind. [Unfortunately this applies to some degree to the word “Islamofascist” too, although hopefully the “fascist” part indicates a distinction is being made from Islam generally.]

The U.S. media never refers to Oklahoma City terrorist bomber Timothy McVeigh as a “Christian terrorist.” Yet he was a zealous Christian fanatic, which was a strong part of his motivation and ideological justification. Like the Islamic terrorists, his brand of Christianity was atypical, although unfortunately the Islamic religious terrorists are much less atypical of Islam in terms of their numbers of adherents and sympathizers. But “Christian terrorist” is certainly not besides the point, it very much goes to the point of McVeigh’s ideology and motivation.

In both cases, what is meant by “Christian” and “Islamic” needs explanation, since both words encompass numerous subsets, which in total have billions of adherents. In other words, it gets complicated.

And since we cannot repeat a book-long explanation of the distinctions every time we mention these killers, we do need a shorthand.

I hope at least “terrorist” is uncontroversial. People who deliberately target civilians over and over would seem to qualify. Especially if they make no bones about it. (At least the U.S. military lies about it and denies killing civilians, hypocrisy being the tribute vice pays to virtue. And I don’t think all civilian deaths at U.S. hands are deliberate- but many are. ) And the deliberate creation of terror as an instrument both of political coercion, and of rule in the case where they seize state power, as the Taliban did, justifies the terrorist label. [Examples: Public displays of gruesome executions, burying women up to their heads and stoning them to death; hangings witnessed by hundreds or thousands to set an example; amputation of limbs, including fingers of children for the “crime” of wearing nail polish; throwing acid in schoolgirls faces to stop them from going to school; assassinations of “collaborators;” well, one could fill a book, and others have, which you can refer to if you need more.]

The bottom line is, we are talking about Islamic religious fanatics who are sadistic and violent and use terrorism to try and gain totalitarian control over the lives of other. (They banned music in Afghanistan, among many other things, and destroyed massive amounts of art and historical treasures.) Not sure what a good one or two word label for these loathsome anti-humans would be. I might be stuck with “Islamofascist” for the time being.

See my blog essay of September 22, 2009, Are Islamic Jihadists Fascist?  for parallels between fascists and today’s Islamic terrorists. Are Islamic Jihadists Fascist?