What is Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week really about?

Have I been unfair to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week? I mean, isn’t it a great thing to be raising the consciousness of young people at colleges all over the country about the dangers of jihadism, excuse me, Islamo-fascism? Why be so negative? Why be so critical, just because I think that calling fundamentalist Muslims “Islamo-fascists” leads people to believe that Islam itself is not the problem?

So let’s be fair and take another look. Apart from the troublesome name “Islamo-fascism,” let’s see what substantive message David Horowitz and his colleagues are putting out through this much ballyhooed, nation-wide extravaganza.

I find this at Phi Beta Cons:

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, David Horowitz spoke to 600 students and various members of the community about the oppression of women in Islam and the silence coming from women’s studies departments on America’s campuses regarding this issue. The volatile crowd quieted immediately when Horowitz began his speech by showing an enlarged photograph of a Muslim woman on her knees being shot in the back of the head by Muslim fundamentalists. “Everyone in this photograph is a Muslim,” Horowitz began. “There is a helpless victim; there are perpetrators of murder. This photograph is why we’re here tonight.”

According to Horowitz, then, the main theme of the evening was increasing young people’s awareness about the Muslim oppression of women. “Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week” seems then to be all about rescuing Muslims, particularly Muslim women, from their own religion, not about (perish the thought) protecting America and the West from Islam. The mission of IFAW is not to preserve our civilization, but to teach tolerance.

But perhaps when Horowitz spoke of “why we’re here tonight,” he was only referring to the theme of the first day of IFAW. Could IFAW’s broader purpose perhaps be something more realistic and self-interested than spreading the balm of tolerance through the harsh places of the earth?

It appears not. FrontPage Magazine reports:

“We have organized students on over 100 campuses across the country, we are hosting over 30 speakers on subjects like the plight of women in Islam and we are leading the discussion on the danger of Islamo Fascism,” David Horowitz said after his speech at the University of Wisconsin Monday night…. “By the end of the week millions of people will have heard our message that we will no longer turn a blind eye to the violence directed against women, gays and ‘infidels’ in Islamo-Fascist regimens. This homicidal intolerance and the conspiracy of silence that protects it on America’s campuses will no longer be accepted.” [Italics added.]

Horowitz is explicit. Over and over, his statement suggests that the aim of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is not, at least primarily, to make Americans more altert to the dangers that Islam, excuse me, Islamo-fascism, poses to us, but to instruct Americans about the dangers that Islamo-fascism poses to women, homosexuals and non-Muslims in the Muslim lands.

Excuse the intrusion of reality here, but what the hell can we do about that? Shall we invade and take over, not just seven Muslim countries as Norman Podhoretz has urged, but all fifty-seven Muslim majority countries, re-engineer their cultures, and make them give up … Islamo-fascism?

No, that’s too crazy. Even Horowitz couldn’t believe that such a thing is possible. What then does he think he’s achieving?

My guess that his purpose is to alter the climate of opinion among the campus left, which has always been his overriding focus of concern. The radical left in America is crazy. They believe that Islam is good, and that all the bad in Islam comes from American oppression, bigotry and greed. Horowitz is trying to lead them away from such craziness to a more sane view, namely that Islam is good, and that all the bad in Islam comes from a tiny minority of “Islamo-fascists,” who are not even Muslims but totalitarian ideologues who have hijacked and distorted the great, wonderful, pluralistic, tolerant religion of Islam. Horowitz is trying to lead the college youth of America away from a deeply insane lie, to a somewhat less insane lie. This is his mission.

Again, both the crazy left, and the somewhat less crazy Horowitz right, believe that Muslims are innocent victims, and must be rescued. The left wants to rescue them from America, Horowitz wants to rescue them from Islamo-fascism. But leftists and Horowitz agree that the principal object of our solicitude is Muslims. Horowitz is not seeking to protect us from Muslims, he’s seeking to protect Muslims from Islamo-fascists. And that is insane.

Sane is what Bat Ye’or said to me several years ago, in a comment I quoted at Horowitz’s own magazine, but which Horowitz sadly never took in:

Our aim as Westerners should not be to save the soul of Islam but to save ourselves, our values, and our civilization.

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Mark P. writes:

You quoted FP reporting the following:

“We have organized students on over 100 campuses across the country, we are hosting over 30 speakers on subjects like the plight of women in Islam and we are leading the discussion on the danger of Islamo Fascism,” David Horowitz said after his speech at the University of Wisconsin Monday night…. “By the end of the week millions of people will have heard our message that we will no longer turn a blind eye to the violence directed against women, gays and ‘infidels’ in Islamo-Fascist regimens. This homicidal intolerance and the conspiracy of silence that protects it on America’s campuses will no longer be accepted.” [Italics added.]

So let me see if I understand this correctly.

The whole point of IFAW is to create a Civil Rights program designed to remedy the disparate impact that Islam has on Western protected classes.

LA replies:

You got it. Horowitz’s ultimate concern is not protecting America from its enemies, it’s about protecting women and homosexuals from intolerance.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been repeatedly lambasting Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week solely on the basis of its dishonest and leftist-sounding name. But now that IFAW has started, it turns out that it’s not just the event’s name that is leftist, but its substance.

Mark P. replies:

I’m telling you…there is absolutely nothing to be gained from this farce. America is not protected; Western civilization is not preserved; Not even conservatism is advanced. It’s a joke.

Sebastian writes:

I vaguely disagree with your criticism of Horowitz’s IFAW. Well, I agree completely with your observation that he and his website are not generally interested in protecting Western culture and our way of life from Islam. He seems to have no feeling for anything but advanced liberalism. I can’t imagine this man looking at a portrait of Frederick the Great and seeing anything but oppression and anti-Semitism.

Nevertheless, I have long believed that one way to get the propagandized Left, meaning college students and journalists, to understand the threat of Islam is to show them what Islam means to their sacred cows of feminism, homosexuality and tolerance. This is what Bruce Bawer’s book and Hirsi Ali’s story convey. Sure, this narrative reduces Western Civ to the advanced liberalism that has allowed Islam to flourish in the West in the first place. But given that these people are never going to be brought to VFR’s perspective, shouldn’t we welcome any roadblock, any increased awareness? Will anyone really draw the distinction between Islam and “Islamo-fascism”? People tend to take away a broad message without the finer details, e.g. Germans = Nazis. Unwittingly, Horowitz may be making a case against Muslim immigration in their little minds. Yes, equating Islam with fascism is absurd, and flushing out radical from tolerant Islam more so. But these students have such rigorous categories and impoverished language, such a knee-jerk response to the word “fascism,” that it may be best to have them think of Islam in negative terms.

The danger, of course, is that in reducing the West to feminism and homosexuality, the same attack on “Islamo-fascism” will be applied to Judaism, Christianity or any pre-1960s form of society. Balancing the equities here is a bit of a puzzle for me.

LA replies:

I have had the same reservations about my position as Sebastian, though he articulates them better. I agree that anything that brings propagandized college students and journalists from the cave below the Platonic Cave, where they now welter, up to the Cave itself, is probably a net gain. The problem is that Horowitz, as always, is letting his message be controlled, not by the truth, but by his desire to adjust to the prevailing leftism. Let’s say that a significant number of young people are persuaded by his message. What are they likely to do about it? they will become frenetically committed to “rescuing moderate Islam” from fascist Islam. The amelioration of Islam, rather than the defense of our society from Islam, will become a greater obsession than ever.

I won’t deny that some good things will come from the event, if it gets people to realize that “Islamo-fascists” are worse enemies than America. But I think the overall effect will be to render us even more welcoming and helpless in the face of non-violent, sharia-believing Islam as it proceeds to gain power in America.

Mark Jaws writes:

I respectfully disagree with you, and I think you have been too hard on Horowitz. I believe IFAW is an important first step in the right direction, whereas an Austerian approach (declaring Islam the problem) would be met with massive resistance from the Academic Left. By running plays from the Left’s playbook (using the civil rights angle), Horowitz is cleverly demonstrating how to get the camel’s nose inside the tent, and thereby make it perfectly acceptable for white Westerners to criticize non-white, non-Christian groups. After a few years once the camel is inside the tent, then we can deal with Islam in its totality as being incompatible with western values.

LA replies:

I respectfully reply that I think Mark’s hopes are false. The only thing Horowitz will be making acceptable for white Westerners to do is to condemn intolerance and oppression of designated victim groups. And, uh, I think we’re already there.

LA continues:

I repeat that I may be wrong; maybe the students being reached by IFAW will end up as pro-Western anti-jihad crusaders who will want to save the West from Islamization. But all recent experience, documented at VFR for the last several years, suggests the opposite. When people adopt liberal/left concepts to understand reality, those concepts remain operative in them. For example, when they subscribe to the idea that our enemy is Islamo-fascism, and that Islam itself is ok, they end up going along with all the consequences of that belief (remember, ideas have consequences?), including the continued admission, approval, and accommodation of Muslims in America, including continuing efforts to democratize the Muslim world, and so on.

I’m not denying that if Horowitz succeeds in reducing the ranks of the radical left, that would be a good thing. But that’s not my main concern. My main concern is that the West stop and reverse the Islamization of the West. And neocons, with their anti-intolerance, anti-discrimination ideology, will not do that. So Horowitz’s Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is but another variation on what the neocons have been doing all along: launching a global liberal crusade, instead of defending and preserving the West.

KPA writes from Canada:

I think your answer to Mark Jaws’s hopes is correct, if I may say so.

I wrote an essay on it—Islam’s Missionary Women—about a year and a half ago, when the Ontario Arbitration Act was under scrutiny because of fears of Sharia Law entering the system.

Muslim women especially are advocating special group treatment. The general Canadian public is naively sympathizing with them, and ignoring or misunderstanding the real issue is Islam itself. This diverts everyone’s attention from solving the root of the problem, and acting, like I think Horowitz is doing, in a kind of feel-good, beneficiary way, while the real culprit keeps on functioning quite unrestrained.

Of course, in my essay, I realized that probably the greater problem is not Islam itself, but the number of Muslims who are here and continue to arrive and bewelcomed with open arms.

LA replies:

KPA’s comment is exactly on point. What will the young people who have been converted by Horowitz’s plea in behalf of oppressed Muslim women want to do? Obviously, they will want to find ways to help Muslim women. Once that becomes their orientation, all the rest follows: open borders, programs to “empower” Muslim women here and abroad, and so on, all of which will have the effect of strengthening Islam in our midst and weakening us. So long as the well-being of oppressed aliens, rather than the health of our own society, is our leading concern, we are not only unable to act for our own preservation but are actively underming it, by getting ourselves in a tighter and tighter embrace with people whose very presence among us spells our doom. There is no salvation for America and the West short of the renunciation and rejection of liberalism.

Ken Hechtman, VFR’s leftist Canadian reader, writes:

Horowitz is playing to a different audience than you are. His arguments won’t fly on VFR, yours won’t fly on a college campus. You have to talk to your audience, in terms they understand, with arguments they’re prepared to consider. Not doing that is one of the classic leftist blind spots. We end up talking to ourselves and we can be right and still lose the argument because nobody is listening.

Horowitz well knows that if he was to attack Islam as such on a college campus his target audience would tune him out. They’d say “Oh, he’s one of those people, one of those racists we don’t need to listen to.” And remember, Horowitz is incredibly sensitive to that criticism. The way he tells the story, the early Civil Rights movement was the one thing he did in his life that was pure and good and right and nobody can ever take that away from him.

What Horowitz is doing now is isolating what’s already the sorest and weakest spot of the Unholy Alliance (the treatment of women and gays) and hammering away at them. This is not a new idea. Campus Hillel clubs have long been pointing out that gay Palestinian kids escape persecution in Palestine and find safety in Israel. Where Horowitz is going with this is he’s trying to replicate his own “Second Thoughts” experience in the college-age generation. He’s trying to make them think “These people are monsters. I cannot apologize for them or run interference for them. I sure as hell can’t help pave the way for them to get the power of life and death over other people—and I can no longer tolerate those among us who do.” The rest of it, embracing God and Country and Tradition, all that comes later. Before you can recruit people onto your side, first you have to detach them from the side they’re on.

That’s the effect he’s going for and feminist and gay identity politics are the best shot he has at getting there with the under-25 college-educated demographic. Talking specifically about the gay issue, it helps to understand this: Attitudes in that demographic have changed as much again since I was an undergrad as they did between then and the time you were an undergrad. When I was an undergrad, gays came out in college. In high school and in their parents’ homes, they hid and lied and lived in fear. Now they come out in high school. There are gay clubs and “Gay Awareness Weeks” in high school now. That didn’t exist in my day. A lot more college kids today grew up knowing that a relative or member of their parent’s circle of friends was gay.

Those who are left of that age who still believe that homosexuality is purely a free-choice decision and therefore punishable as a sin are active members of certain conservative religious denominations. That’s it. Everyone else that age believes it’s a non-free-choice condition and whoever thinks different is a medieval witch-burner.

LA replies:

Those who say that college students will only heed a leftist message, and that is what we must give them, even though the leftist message will not help us protect our society against Islam, are like Mulla Nasrudin who looks for his key under a street lamp because there is light there, even though he knows his key is not under the street lamp. He lost it in his house, but there’s no light in his house, so he doesn’t want to search there, he wants to search where there is light. We are supposed to avoid Mulla Nasrudin’s seemingly “practical” approach to the problem of finding his key, because his “practical” approach cannot succeed.

That is my commentary on David Horowitz’s “realistic” approach to politics.

Work for the truth, that’s what we need to do, not tailor our message to our audience to the point of losing our message altogether. This doesn’t mean that Horowitz needs to go to campuses sounding like me. But he could go to campuses sounding like, say, Robert Spencer or Andrew Bostom, talking about the nature of Islam and how it subjugates everything that comes within its reach. He wouldn’t have to speak about the greatness of Western civ, he could talk about how Islam threatens all of our freedoms. In other words, he could make a liberal argument in defense of the West. That’s still a valid argument. But what he should not do is make his main focus the oppression of Muslim women and homosexuals under Islam. That doesn’t do us any good at all.

Mark Jaws writes:

I will say it again—Horowitz is gaining a foothold on a beach that has heretofore been impenetrable. Don’t you think after students have learned about multiple instances of “Islamo-fascist” atrocities in Algeria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc that the alarm bell will start ringing in some of their noggins, indicating to them that the very same thing may happen here to OUR feminists and gays? Many are likely to be moved to the point of wanting and demanding redder meat—the type offered by Spencer and Bostom, and perhaps eventually Auster.

LA replies:

We will see …

In any case, I will be attending the Horowitz event at Columbia University on Friday, just to hear what he has to say.

Mark P. writes:

Mark Jaws wrote the following:

“I will say it again—Horowitz is gaining a foothold on a beach that has heretofore been impenetrable. Don’t you think after students have learned about multiple instances of “Islamo-fascist” atrocities in Algeria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc that the alarm bell will start ringing in some of their noggins, indicating to them that the very same thing may happen here to OUR feminists and gays? Many are likely to be moved to the point of wanting and demanding redder meat—the type offered by Spencer and Bostom, and perhaps eventually Auster.”

That’s just great. We’ll enlist the help of the Left to make America safe for homosexuals and women, and, once they are safe, the feminists and gay activists will go back to turning white males like me into second-class citizens.

Couldn’t Horowitz give people like me a reason to support the war on terror that doesn’t involve making America safe for Hillary Clinton?

Jacob M. writes:

Mark Jaws wrote: “Don’t you think after students have learned about multiple instances of ‘Islamo-fascist’ atrocities in Algeria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc that the alarm bell will start ringing in some of their noggins, indicating to them that the very same thing may happen here to OUR feminists and gays?”

Yes, and what conclusion will they draw from this information? That religion, including Christianity, is anathema to our society and has got to go. We’ve seen that the left increasingly views traditional Christianity as indistinguishable from “Islamism,” and lumps both under the label of “conservative.” (cf. the religious right or the Republican Party as “the American Taliban.”) To them, those who stone women for having been raped or hang homosexuals are not Muslims per se, they are “theocrats” or “conservatives” or “religious bigots.” So to point up Muslims’ treatment of women and homosexuals will increase their ire not against Muslims, but against “religious bigots,” which they will identify in America as conservative Christians and begin attacking with greater furor than ever before. Pandering to liberals’ hatred of intolerance and discrimination will not inspire them to defend Western Civilization, it will only inflame their hatred of it.

LA replies:

Well said, well said.

Jake Jacobsen. writes:

We attended the IFAW here in Chicago where Robert Spencer spoke. Our coverage here with video of Mr. Spencer’s speech and some of the Q&A afterwards.

While I overall agree with your criticisms of this event I would like to note that the evening I attended was nothing like what was described in this piece. Spencer and a Depaul professor named Scott Hibbard had a (IMHO) solid debate over America’s future dealings with Islam. Hibbard took the “realist” position that if we could just get all that messy religion junk out of the way we could solve this lickety split while Spencer retorted quite rightly that he would love to hear how exactly we do that.

On the evening I attended Spencer was sharp and on his game. I think he won over those who could be won over, and that’s not nothing! And as I note in my coverage it was a turnaway crowd, for a small room granted, but it was still a turnaway crowd.

From the coverage I’ve read it seems these events were more or less free standing primarily driven by whomever the “personality” of the evening was. If ours was any indication I’m tempted to think that more good than harm will come of them.

LA replies:

As I’ve been showing over and over, Spencer has a markedly different approach to the Islam problem than Horowitz (though as colleageus they downplay the differences). I specifically said that Horowitz would do better to take something like Spencer’s line on Islam. So you’re not telling me anything I don’t know.

What I want to know is, what did Spencer say the Islam problem consists if, and what did he say ought to be DONE about it?

Jake replies:

He said the “Islam problem” was the religion of Islam, but he didn’t address what to do about it. Which I do understand makes him one of the “Usual Suspects”! [LA replies: Yes, and it also makes him very different from Horoiwitz, who cannot say that the religion of Islam is the problem without contradicting his campaign against “Islamo-fascism,” which says that the religion of Islam is not the problem.]

However the discussion Monday night was more focused on America’s foreign policy, so the tenor was more like, “What should we do about Iran getting nukes,” and that sort of thing.

Sage McLaughlin writes (10-25):

I’ve been following the discussion on IFAW, and I have to say I think people are grasping at straws in trying to defend Horowitz. I understand the impulse—he seems to be bringing attention to the bestial nature of Islam, and that’s a good thing, right? Well, not really. What he’s objecting to—explicitly—is fascism, that old enemy of the left that still seems to be popping up everywhere. (It’s even right here in America—just ask Naomi Wolf.) Anyway, I think Horowitz’s defenders are making this more complicated than it really is.

I have a hard time making conservative friends and family see this point, which is surprising because it seems so elementary. If you’re only able to object to things on liberal grounds, you’re not a conservative. If Horowitz has some authentically conservative grounds on which to object to Islamic brutality, let’s hear it. Claiming that he HAS to put things in leftists terms so that people will understand them is to concede far more ground than is truly necessary—and it means being to some extent complicit in the control that PC already has on the minds of so many.

A woman I know frequently comes to me and relays with some pride that she has been able to point out the hypocrisy of liberals that she knows—aren’t they being “intolerant” of her conservative Christian views? Shouldn’t they really extend their own rhetoric about inclusiveness to include Christians? I have difficulty pointing out that all her interlocutors have really been forced to admit to is that they are not yet sufficiently LIBERAL. She argues in explicitly liberal terms—inclusiveness is the highest good, everybody should be tolerated, and so on. She then gets them to admit that yes, perhaps they need to work harder at being fully inclusive. Her victory is not a conservative victory, but a liberal victory.

The point is that you don’t have to turn to liberalism to condemn the more bestial manifestations of Islam. But Horowitz doesn’t know or understand any moral language outside liberalism. Maybe that’s because he’s a pro-choice, pro-homosexual, pro-feminism, red diaper baby? Just a hunch.

In short, you can’t convey a conservative sense of things with left-liberal arguments. What’s so hard to understand about that?

LA replies:

It is the incoherent mixture of conservative and liberal ideas that defines American conservatism.

Mark Jaws writes:

Jacob M. wrote:

“So to point up Muslims’ treatment of women and homosexuals will increase their ire not against Muslims, but against ‘religious bigots,’ which they will identify in America as conservative Christians and begin attacking with greater furor than ever before. Pandering to liberals’ hatred of intolerance and discrimination will not inspire them to defend Western Civilization, it will only inflame their hatred of it.”

That was a great point, Jacob, and one which I should have known, being familiar with the liberal lumping of conservative evangelicals with Islam. My mistake was in attempting to graft my conservative rational and logic into the heads of young, brainwashed liberals and I failed miserably. Even an old and battle-scarred liberalologist such as yours truly can still learn a great many things at VFR. I must constantly remind myself that we think red, and they think (or what passes for thinking) blue. Mark P, Sage, Jacob M, and you, Mr. Auster, have brought me back to reality. Thank you. I am now in recovery.

LA replies:

I agree with Mark Jaws that Jacob M.’s comment cut to the heart of the issue. If you inculcate in young people the liberal message that the most important thing is to oppose intolerance and oppression of outsiders and minorities, and then, living in the midst of liberal America, they dutifully look around for some intolerant oppressor to oppose, whom are they going to find? Not jihadists, but Christians, conservatives, whites, capitalism, property, the traditional family, America, Western civilization.

BTW, I didn’t want to say this publicly earlier, but I was surprised that such a hard-line fellow as Mark Jaws was taking the position he was taking.

Anti-Islam, or anti traditional Christianity? Terry Morris writes:

These liberally educated, undiscerning college kids at 100 universities across the nation are having their “awareness” raised, not to Islamic extremism, but to religious extremism. To them, “fundamentalist Christianity” and “Islamo-fascism” must be very close to the same thing; perhaps different stages of the same thing. To their minds it’s probably a short walk from Christian “persecution” of homosexuals to the kind of persecution toward the same group from “Islamo-fascists.” So they’re not going to be on the lookout for Islamo-fascism in America, but for what they’ll conceive as the seeds of fascism—Christian fundamentalism.

LA replies:

If persecution of homosexuals and inequality of women are the main objections to “Islamo-fascism,” then why should people today feel any identity with the Christian Europeans who fended off Islamic conquest in the past? Those Christian Europeans punished sodomy, sometimes with capital punishment, and gave fewer rights to women. From the point of view of young people shaped by Horowitz’s message, between the Moslem invaders of France in 732, and the Franks under Charles Martel who drove them back and saved the West, what is there to choose?

I think the question could be fairly asked of David Horowitz: “Since you have frequently said that in the Middle Ages Jews received better treatment from Moslems than from Christians, and therefore Jews fled Europe to live in Moslem lands, and since to my knowledge you have never defended medieval Christendom, if you had been Jew in Spain in the early eighth century, would you have supported the Moslem conquest of Spain, or would you have sided with the Visigothic Spanish Christians? If you had been a Jew living in the Frankish kingdom in 732, would you have supported the Moslem invasion of France, or would you have been on the side of Charles Martel?

Terry M. replies:

Right on! This is exactly the point. There’s no reason for them to feel any identity with any form of “religious extremism,” past or present. And since the majority of religious extremists in America (defined as such by their persecution of gays and women and other minorities) are going to be Christians, then it stands to reason that these students are going to identify the slightest manifestations of what they perceive to be religious extremism in Christians and Christianity first and foremost, Islamic-Fascism notwithstanding.

As for your next comment stating “From the point of view of young people shaped by Horowitz’s message…” I would only add that they were already well prepared to receive Horowitz’s message by their upbringings and primary educations. So Horowitz is only “shaping” them in the sense that he’s guiding their liberal minds to form logical liberal conclusions on the subject, i.e., that the real culprit is religious extremism, not Islam, and religious extremism is what they need to be on the lookout for, the first elements of it—Christian “persecution” of gays and women and minorities. This is the reason why his whole notion here was and is ill-conceived and dangerous.

LA replies:

However, having heard Horowitz speak at Columbia University today, I can’t say there was anything that would turn listeners positively against Christianity (except for his passing, obligatory statement that Europe in the Middle Ages was harder on Jews than Islam was). His focus was not on persecution, or “religious dictatorship,” or “theocracy” (translation: Christianity). His focus was on the left, their anti-Americanism, their siding with America’s enemies.

But that’s a reflection of Horowitz particular pre-occupations. It doesn’t change the liberal, “anti-oppression” rhetoric we’ve noted in the message of IFAW. However, how large a role such rhetoric plays in that message and the effect it will have on converts to the Horowitz view are to be determined.

Remember, for leftist college students simply to hear the message that there is something bad in the world, and that it’s not America, could be an earthquake for them, the effects of which may well be on balance positive. But that’s only in relation to the insanely distorted, paranoid world view they currently harbor, in which they think that America is the source of terrorism. In relation to people in possession of normal rationality, acceptance of the dishonest expression Islamo-fascism can only be harmful.

Extreme medicine needed for diseased minds may be poison to normal minds. But Horowitz is not using “Islamo-fascist” just for the diseased minds of leftist college students. He’s promoting the expression for everyone.

N. writes:

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu famously is quoted as saying, “The first step to wisdom is to call things by their right names.” To call things by their right names requires one to see the thing clearly, and to know its properties, characteristics, etc. In other words, one has to see clearly, not engage in self deception and understand deeply as steps toward wisdom.

The term “IslamoFascism” cannot be a “right name,” for all the reasons that you have stated. Therefore to use it is to walk directly away from wisdom.

LA replies:

I’ve felt this for years. Every time I start reading an article and the author in the first paragraph says “Islam-fascist,” I immediately become unable to take the writer seriously. Anyone who uses such a fake, ludicrous expression shows such a lack of sound thinking that his judgment on all matters comes into question. Yet the whole “conservative” movement now uses it.

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Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 24, 2007 11:00 AM | Send