Islamo-Fascism or Judeo-Fascism?

Since 9/11, President Bush has repeatedly assured the Islamic world that Muslims per se were not America’s enemy. However, on Aug. 7, 2006, he used the term “Islamo-fascism” to describe the “jihadist message.” Before then, the term had been bandied about mostly by neoconservative pundits interested in prosecuting their own pro-Israel agenda in the Middle East.

Muslim leaders across the US immediately registered loud complaints about the president’s choice of words. Equating Islam with fascism was at best hyperbole, and at worst an epithet aimed at tarnishing one of the world’s great religions. Four in ten Americans already harbor negative opinions about Islam.

Perhaps President Bush was stirring up anti-Muslim sentiment in the run up to the November elections.

The president would have been better advised to develop an understanding of fascism before he ascribed it to Islam. Had he done so, he would have quickly found that Islam and fascism are fundamentally incompatible.

The term “fascism” came into vogue in 1920s and 1930s to describe an ideology that had been born in reaction to Marxism and communism. Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy emphasized the importance of the state as an organic entity rather than as protector of individual rights. The state controlled all aspects of life. It exploited populist rhetoric, exalted heroic effort — especially war — to achieve past greatness, and exacted absolute loyalty to a single leader. And its ends always justified the means, no matter how murderous.

In Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s fascist counterpart, Adolf Hitler, took a more racist bent. Glorifying the Aryan nation-state and seeking to achieve a 1000-year reign (Reich) of Aryan world domination, Nazi Germany implemented a policy of conquering new lands, eradicating the local populations, and replacing them with Germans. The policy was known as lebensraum. Today it is called “ethnic cleansing.”

Can fascism, then, be applied to Islam? The simple answer is that it cannot. First and foremost, Islam recognizes no borders. The “state” cannot even be defined. Nor can the individual be required to supplicate himself or herself to any entity or person other than God. Islam means “submission” to God, not to some petty dictator. Islam does not force individuals to convert to its beliefs. And Islam does not condone the murder of innocents for any reason, including for the good of the “state.”

However, upon closer analysis, President Bush would have discovered that there exists in the world today one state where fascist elements combine with religious fervor to dictate state policies: Israel. First, Israel is a self-declared Jewish state. The acceptance of its existence and its Jewish identity is of paramount importance in Israeli society. Non-Jews who live in Israel can never hope to be full-fledged citizens because they are not Jewish. National identity cards define not only citizenship but also nationality, of which there are three: Jewish, Arab, and Druze. In a slap at its indigenous (pre-1967 borders) Arab population (one million strong), the Jewish state denies citizenship to the spouses of Israeli citizens who marry Arab residents of the West Bank or Gaza. Citizenship also will be denied to their offspring. And only those political parties which accept the “Zionist” character of the state may present candidates for the Israeli Parliament. This forecloses representation of a large percentage of the indigenous Arabs.

Moreover, fascism has deep historical roots in Israel’s formation and in certain of the political parties presently represented in its Parliament, the Knesset. Israel’s National Union Party is an admixture of the Molodet and Tkuma parties, which were progeny of the 1940s Herut, Zeev Jabotinsky’s political party that took its cues from fascism. Likewise, in 1940 Avraham Stern, inspired by Jabotinsky, formed the Irgun Zvai Leumi-be-Yisrael (Lehi) terror group dedicated to killing anyone standing in the way of a homeland for Jews. Lehi even offered to team up with the Nazis during World War II in return for support for a new Jewish state to be administered along fascist lines.

Perhaps Albert Einstein and some other concerned Jewish leaders said it best in 1948 when they wrote a letter to the New York Times commenting upon the formation of the “Freedom Party” in Israel. The described the party as “closely akin . . . to the Nazi and fascist parties.” The party had been formed from the Irgun, described in the letter as a “right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.” Menachem Begin (a future prime minister of Israel) was the party leader.

Today, the National Union and its soul mate, Yisrael Beytenu, advocate the forced removal of Palestinian Arabs from Israel proper, from the Gaza Strip, and from the occupied West Bank. Following the classic modus operandi of lebensraum, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank would be annexed to form Greater Israel, which would then be populated by waves of Jewish settlers. To these contemporary Israeli political parties, the sanctity of the State of Israel, the merit of blood sacrifice for its benefit, and the use of military might in its expansion find Biblical justification in Exodus 17:14 and Numbers 14:45.

On a more practical level, since 1967 Israel’s military and security forces have inflicted on the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank collective punishment, torture, destruction of economic infrastructure, and extrajudicial killings. Such actions are not unlike those practiced by the Nazi occupiers of 1940s Europe.

Obviously, then, unlike “Islamo-fascism,” the term “Judeo-fascism” has both historical and practical currency. However, the use of the term usually raises the hackles of a myriad of Jewish organizations because as Holocaust victims and survivors, Jews are not supposed to mimic the behavior of their own tormentors. Yet that is precisely what they have done in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. Thirty-nine years of occupation have brutalized the occupiers and the occupied.

Yet, peace demands that the use of the term “Judeo-fascism” be minimized because of the inflammatory effect it has on any discussion of the fundamental issues that divide today’s Semitic peoples. The same is true of ersatz terms like “Islamo-fascism.” It is time for dialogue, not sound bites. Only in that way can both peoples revisit another Golden Age of mutual respect and accomplishment. In helping to achieve this task, President Bush has to learn to be a leader, not a follower.

— Randall B. (Nadeem) Hamud is an attorney at law based in San Diego, CA.E-mail to:rhamud@san.rr.com