Pizza is the New Spaghetti Posted by Shadi Hamid

Can we stop comparing Islamic extremism/radical Islamism/or whatever else we might wish to call it to Western ideologies. I understand the temptation to make the unfamiliar seem familiar but, in the wrong hands, such comparisons obscure much more than they clarify. In a recent interview, Niall Ferguson, scoffs at “Islamism is the new fascism,” but then tells us that Islamism is the new Marxism. Fine, I can understand where he’s going with this, but what, ultimately, does it really mean to say that radical Islamism = Lenin plus the Koran? It’s sort of like saying spaghetti is like pizza. Yes, they both have sauce and I personally like to sprinkle as much parmesan cheese as possible on both. But then what? Sometimes, comparisons, even if they make some degree of sense, are quite pointless. As Daniel Drezner suggests, why can’t we just understand political Islam and its various derivatives for what they actually are and not for what we would like to think they resemble?

Comments

[jayinbmore]

...why can’t we just understand political Islam and its various derivatives for what they actually are and not for what we would like to think they resemble?

Because in the American public mind "Fascism" is linked with WWII, the honorable war against facism, waged by The Greatest Generation. Linking this with our current conflict makes it far easier for the administration to sell the wars it wants to wage. It's far harder to sell random land wars if the public understands that the defeat of Radical Islamism requires a different set of strategies and tactics.

[zak822]

Jayinbomore has it right, and the same applies to Marxism.

The two great, defeated enemies.

[flagrl118]

Marxism, Fascism and Islam are three completely different issues. Marxism is a political and social philosophy that believes in social equity where as Fascism believes in superior races and inequity. Islam, on the other hand, is religion. Although I know little about Islam, I know that we are going about solving the Islam "problem" in the most wrong way. We need to be addressing the issues at hand, why they are attacking us or using martydom to express themselves. They are being denied some basic human rights and justice. Attacking them further isn't going to give them that but addressing the UN Millennium Development Goals will. Addressing extreme poverty and hunger, primary education, health and women's rights will help reduce terrorism. Additionally, we say Political Islam is bad, but what about Christian Conservatives? It is the same thing.

Book to read: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, by Mahmood Mamdani...open your eyes

[Don Bacon]

The warmongers have to state the threat in terms that ordinary people might understand, as jayinbmore wrote, thus the comparison. It's expansion and consolidation of an alien culture which they consider threatening. Bush and Rumsfeld have repeatedly warned about the unification of Islam under a Caliphate establishing "a totalitarian Islamic empire reaching from Spain to Indonesia." There are bases for this concern deriving from the statements of Muslims and from al Qaeda. Personally, I think that it is US polcy to create and sustain the Sunni/Shia split. I think that the mosque bombing in American-controlled Samarra that kicked things off in Iraq and the American-trained "Salvadoran option" death squads are parts of this effort.

[Lane Brody]

It's a tad silly to ask that comparisons of this nature cease. Marxism and Islamism might have little to do with each other but they can be an individual or groups controlling ideology.

Certainly comparisons can both confuse and hide the issues and can lead to incorrect conclusions; however, to deny there are any comparisons would be even more wrong.

Communism, Facism, and Islamism are all quite different but all share a crucial attribute in being the controlling ideolgical cover behind brutal controlling police states with extremely active secret police forces with varying names all doing the same thing and enforcing the state ideology.

To state that "warmongers" need threats is both a truim and an implication that there are no real outside forces that wish us serious harm. The broad no-nukes movement, especially in the early 1980's in Europe, repeatedly told us Reagan was the warmonger and that the USSR was not the enemy. This was often extremely well meaning but it was both wrong and naive. JFK was no warmonger as evidenced by his handling of the Cuban Missle Crisis but he increased peacetime military spending and often spoke of fighting for liberty.

It is exactly the fight for liberty that is why comparisons to all these ideologies is apt as they are all centered on a bedrock of repression, slavery, and death. If being against that is being a warmonger then count me in.

[J Thomas]

It isn't enough to be against repression, slavery and death. I'm sure the islamists and communists are also against those things.

What you need to do is support people who are actually not spreading repression, slavery and death. Picking one side and saying that our repression slavery and death is better than the enemy's repression slavery and death is, well, retarded.Unless you can't find any better way to make a profit.

[Don Bacon]

Lane, you've bought the government line that it's a fight for liberty. No. That's just the latest spin. Or framing.

Vietnam wasn't a fight for liberty. The Vietnamese people favored Ho Chi Minh. We invaded and installed a puppet in southern Vietnam to counter ther people's favorite and millions died. We're now on the best of terms with Vietnam. They died in vain.

Everybody knows that we're in Iraq and Afghanistan to enhance our energy supplies--we could care less about liberty. Why do we arbitrarily shoot, kidnap, torture and harrass Iraqis if we are there to promote their liberty? Why did we overthrow a secular, relatively open Iraqi state in favor of an Iran-aligned Islamic state if not for the oil and water? Why did we overthrow our nominal ally the Taliban in Afghanistan if not for the oil pipeline rights through that country? To get Osama? No. There was (and is) little interest in Osama except as an ongoing bogeyman.

Warmongers, by definition, start wars. That's us. Warmongers 'R Us.

[Lane Brody]

The notion that Islamism and Communism are against slavery and repression is irrational on a profoundly scary level. Women without any rights in many muslim nations live as slaves. The Taliban in almost every respect treated women as a matter of policy and law as slaves. The many books by dissendents in the former USSR and the current PRC talk about leaving as a slave.

The Bush administration didn't invent the notion that one is either free or one is a slave.

The entire notion that we invaded Afganistan and Iraq for oil is irrational. If the issue were oil then we would have lifted the sanctions against Saddam and gotten all the oil. Oil is a global commodity like corn. It doesn't matter where the oil comes from- it only matters how much oil there is in the world vs how much demand.

Frankly if we needed to militarily control more oil the oil that actually really matters to the US is in Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela.

If "warmongers" start wars then this nation was founded by a group of warmongers. The implication that all wars are morally wrong is one reason the statement is problematic.

Furthermore, on the broad political level the democratic party continuing the tradition of labeling people who start wars as "warmongers", with the implication on war, is EXACTLY what is wrong with the Democratic party today and EXACTLY why the Republicans can always remind the nation that on national security the Dems can't be trusted.

One can easily argue the war was a cosmic mistake, that the conduct of the war was negligent, and that the continued prosecution of the war is flawed (even fatally flawed if you wish) but to make the jump to "warmonger" with all the anti-war implications is simply counter-productive on a very basic political level.

[J Thomas]

The notion that Islamism and Communism are against slavery and repression is irrational on a profoundly scary level.

Strawman. Anybody can say they're against slavery and repression. Bush says it. Pretty much everybody says it. Don't look at what they say, look at what they do. The US government has gone into the slavery and repression and death business. You support them in it by lying about what's going on.

The entire notion that we invaded Afganistan and Iraq for oil is irrational. If the issue were oil then we would have lifted the sanctions against Saddam and gotten all the oil.

I don't know why we invaded those countries. It might easily have been for something irrational. But your next strawman argument is silly. We didn't simply want the opportunity to buy more oil. When oil is a weapon, denying it to your enemies can be as important -- or more important -- than being the highest bidder. If we control middle east oil we can deny it to europe and china and japan and india -- all of them our enemies or potential enemies. Your claim is simply wrong. I don't know why you'd think that would convince anybody. But your fellow shills have been pushing that line like they think it sells.

Frankly if we needed to militarily control more oil the oil that actually really matters to the US is in Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela.

If the time comes that we can't control mexico and canada without actually sending in the Marines, we'll be in sad shape. And venezuela can wait, we can take them any time. The one coup failed but we can try again. The venezuelan officer corps is US-trained. Some combination of them will do what we want without us needing to fight them. Sheesh.

....to make the jump to "warmonger" with all the anti-war implications is simply counter-productive on a very basic political level.

This is the next-to-last refuge of the scoundrel. Just before "You have to support my side or you aren't patriotic" is "You can't tell the truth because people won't like it."

You're a little late on this one. The pro-war side is fading away. Give us another year of failure and there won't be anybody left but the shills like you.

Lane Brody is a classy singer and I hate that you took her name.

[Don Bacon]

Islamic women living as slaves--memories of Karen Hughes
Washington Report, December 2005, pages 24-26

KAREN Hughes, the new undersecretary for public diplomacy in charge of improving the U.S. image abroad, has returned from several “listening tours” of the Muslim world. Her first mission, in September, took her to close U.S. allies in the Middle East—Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. In October she visited Indonesia and Malaysia.

But the reception she got in those countries, where she met professional women and students among others, often bordered on the angry, and she was ridiculed in the press. It was hardly the reaction George W. Bush’s close adviser, who has overseen campaigns to get him elected twice as governor of Texas and president, would have hoped for on her foray into diplomacy.

A group of women in Turkey told Hughes cooperation on women’s issues would be difficult, given the U.S. occupation of Iraq. One participant pointed out that war completely erases the rights of women. “It’s Bush in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and maybe it’s going to be in Indonesia, I don’t know. Who’s the terrorist? Bush or us Muslims?” an Indonesian student asked Hughes in Jakarta. Another likened the American president to Adolf Hitler.

In Cairo, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was again condemned, while Hughes’ enthusiasm about Egypt’s recent multiparty presidential election—which saw intimidation and incidents of fraud and low turnout—amused many.

When Hughes told Saudi women in Jeddah they should be able to drive and “fully participate in society,” she was informed they are content. “The general image of the Arab woman is that she isn’t happy. Well, we’re all pretty happy,” a member of the audience said to a roomful of applause.

“Fiasco” was how U.S. commentator Fred Kaplan described the visit. “Let’s say some Muslim leader wanted to improve Americans’ image of Islam,” he posited. “It’s doubtful that he would send as his emissary a woman in a black chador who had spent no time in the United States, possessed no knowledge of our history or movies or pop music, and spoke no English beyond a heavily accented ‘good morning.’”

[Reynolds]

To my knowledge the first coining of the term "Islmofascism," came not from the Bush administration but from journalist Oriana Fallaci 11 days after September 11th. Her book, The Rage and the Pride, while mostly a rant, makes a reasonable case for calling the actions of (islamists)/(done in the name of islamists{islam}) Fascist. National Socialism under Hitler employed the goal of restoring Germany's national pride to whip up Nationalist sentiment to justify military action. Islamists too hope to use Islam as a means by which to fan the nationalist sentiment, or rather the sentiment of pan-national-religious-identity, as a means of restoring an Islamic civilization stretching from Morocco to Malaysia. The term Islamofascism is a conscious effort, however poor an effort, to disassociate Islamism from Islamofascism. Just as not all Socialists were not National Socialist Nazis, so not all Islamists are Islamofascists. The term is islamofascist is justified, despite the negative connotations it foists on Islam. We need a better term that is not so demeaning to 1/5 of the world's population which is Muslim and not fascist. What would you substitute?

[Reynolds]

It's been a long day, apologies. I meant for that to read...

Her book, The Rage and the Pride, while mostly a rant, makes a reasonable case for calling (the) actions (of islamists)/(done in the name of islamists{islam}) Fascist. National Socialism under Hitler employed the goal of restoring Germany's national pride to whip up Nationalist sentiment to justify military action. Islamists too hope to use Islam as a means by which to fan the nationalist sentiment, or rather the sentiment of pan-national-religious-identity, as a means of restoring an Islamic civilization stretching from Morocco to Malaysia. The term Islamofascism is a conscious effort, however poor an effort, to disassociate Islamism from Fascism. Just as not all Socialists were National Socialist Nazis, so not all Islamists are Islamofascists. The term is islamofascist is justified, despite the negative connotations it foists on Islam. We need a better term that is not so demeaning to 1/5 of the world's population which is Muslim and not fascist. What would you substitute?

[Free=Speaker]

"Communism, Facism, and Islamism are all quite different but all share a crucial attribute in being the controlling ideolgical cover behind brutal controlling police states with extremely active secret police forces with varying names all doing the same thing and enforcing the state ideology."

Incorrect. In an Islamic state (like the caliphate of 1000+ years) State ideology is not enforced through secret police or any other back handed tactic, but rather the same was as democracies implement their ideology i.e. through law.

Islam has fixed laws called sharia. There is also method of extracting new rulings from existing sharia for new situations.

The Islamic state had never enforced people to convert or to do things that are their private affair. Yes there are many things considered as duties of a Muslim and thus the state has laws against people shying away from their duties. But such laws do not present harsh punishments. The punishments that "seem" harsh to people are only for big crimes like theft, rape, murder etc. The implementation of these laws was the reason for the low crime rate in the caliphate.

Just because Al Qaeda claim they are working for the caliphate does not mean the caliphate is going to be a state of hate and terror like Al Qaeda.

If someone brutally murders another person for a piece of bread, you cant say that wanting bread is evil and anyone wanting bread will want to kill people for it. That is just illogical. Same goes with Caliphate.

There are non violent education/political movements for caliphate too but they are banned too. That is why some idiots go and join Al Qaeda and such terrorist groups.

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