Ann Arbor News: "Danger Lurks In The Term "Islamofacism."

Danger lurks in use of term 'Islamofascism'
Thursday, November 08, 2007
If language is a window on the world, a deliberate smudging of that window will make it harder to see the world clearly and comprehend it. So it is with the highly ideological term "Islamofascist,'' a label that is being wielded as a blunt weapon in a left-right debate and has been carelessly bandied about by some presidential candidates.

Recently, the former leftist turned rightist David Horowitz promoted something called "Islamofascism Awareness Week'' on college campuses. The implication was that the academic left has so lost its bearings that it can no longer recognize its historic enemy, the old fascist wolf, under that beast's new disguise. Another apparent aim was to discredit scholars who insist on making careful distinctions among the various movements and ideologies that are grouped under the rubric of political Islam.

Transparent as the intentions of Horowitz may be, the Republican candidates' use of "Islamofascism'' is cruder still, and may cause considerably more harm. Just before he dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas spoke of a threat from Islamofascism during a visit to the Boston Globe. Rudy Giuliani - whose foreign policy adviser, Norman Podhoretz, just published a book touting World War IV against Islamofascism - commonly derides the Democrats because they "couldn't even utter the word 'Islamic terrorism.''' And former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, while using the less obfuscatory term "radical Islamic jihadists,'' has been striving to keep up with his competition by putting out a television ad titled "Jihad'' and invoking what he calls "a military threat unlike anything we've known before.''
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