An old Bob Newhart routine has him discussing a man he dislikes. "But I don't hate him. Hate is like, Hitler. This guy is more like...Mussolini."
I was just wondering idly why a variety of commentators started referring to Islamofascists instead of Islamonazis. Think about it; run-of-the-mill European fascists produced a number of more or less repellent dictatorships that were mostly overrun by Allied armies by 1945, but in a few cases (Spain being the most important) escaped to age into a kind of decayed somnolence, not entirely unlike some Arab governments today. The people called Islamofascists want to overthrow those governments, or most of them, suggesting that either they are grossly deluded or that the term is wrong.
On the other hand European fascists, while they nursed ancient prejudices against Jews, didn't generally take them to the extreme the German Nazis did -- officially, I mean, as a matter of party ideology. You could be a fascist without wanting to kill Jews, but not a Nazi. So why wouldn't Hasan Nasrallah be an Islamonazi instead of an Islamofascist?
Then there is that third hand, on which al Qaeda types pretty much have it in for everyone and want to spread Islamist revolution to all sorts of places whether they seem ready for it or not. Wouldn't this make al Qaeda an Islamotrotskyist organization? Clearly there is a difference between al Qaeda and the Iranian President, who only wants to stir up trouble in specific places and is mostly preoccupied with his own country's power. An Islamoleninist, or an Islamobrehznevist? You could do a whole symposium on that topic alone.
There is no telling what additional contributions I might make to the subject of terrorist taxomony if it weren't so late and I didn't have a pile of work waiting for me tomorrow. All I'd really meant to observe was that even those ideologically-minded pundits searching for an appropriately pejorative-sounding adjective for terrorists seem to have recognized the modern rule of debate holding that you've lost if you start comparing people to Hitler and the Nazis. Even terrorists. Or Mike Nolan.
JEB
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