We do. Its called “Democratic Centralism”.

Wel yes. There are small nationalist parties commonly called neofascist in the UK, France, Belgium and most (all?) Western countries, collecting single digit popular support. Every modern and post-modern country has people like that, to a greater or lesser extent.

It is a quirk of the US electoral system that the corresponding people in the US vote Republican.

And it is a quirk of the Saudi and Egyptian political systems that the corresponding people in those countries present themselves as preachers and holy warriors.

I thought that was an interesting term and maybe a little accurate.

For Fundamentalist—Christian, Muslim or whatever, maybe Supremacist works better.

“Maybe the (very small) rational kernel in the Islamofascism concept is that Islamic fundamentalism is a form of populist radical conservatism that annexes some left rhetoric for its own ends, such as anti-imperialism, whilst ruthlessly destroying genuine left forces.

For the past two decades the message from the radicals has been “Democracy didn’t work. Socialism didn’t work. Lets return to Islam”.

The Nazis had the SAME message: “The Monarchy failed us, The Weimar Republic failed us, so lets look for glory in the past”. This went hand in hand with the demonization of “the other” where “the other” was marked by by it’s absence from “true” Germanic culture – which was defined in reference to the mythical far past.

While Nazism drew much from modern theories, it always tried to root such theories in a ceonception of history. While given a modern “racial” veneer, the stereotype of the tall, muscular, blond, german is rooted in Greco-Roman conception of their Celtic and Germanic adversaries. They tapped into the romantic “Noble Savage” sterotype which predates Rousseau by millenia – the urbanized Greeks and Romans had a long tradition of posing the “Barbarians” as a savage, but also noble and uncorrupted, “other” against which to compare their civilized, but overly-decadent and unvirtuous, selves. Hitler appealed to the image of the “true’ German as one of these noble, but furious, savages. The policy of Euthenasia was justifed “scientifically” but also by refering to the ancient traditions of exposing infants to weed out the weak. The Nazis took pains to fake historical finds in order advance the theory that the Indo-European migrations (including the branch called themselves the ‘Arya’ – meaning pure) had originated in Germany, and his plan for Russia was fundamentally inspired by his vision of the these as well as the Volkerwanderung – the Germanic Migrations which marked a demographic shift over all of Western Europe and Central Europe as well as the Balkans and took down the Western Roman Empire.

Precisely so; no further parsings are necessary.

I think the tendency of some Forever War advocates to speak of GWOT/GSAVE/Gwhatever as “World War IV” (III being the Cold War, natch, but without the actual “war” bit) is a similar attempt at conflation.

Similarly, there is some textual warrant and historical precedent for young Earth creationism within Christianity. That does not mean that testable factual claims derived from that tradition are religious, and so outside the domain of science.

It seems to me that there is a strong danger of gross error or miscommunication if you analyse and describe a movement primarily on the basis of self-descriptions written in a different language by people of a different culture who divide the world into subtly different categories.

As a possible miscommunication, ‘al Qaeda are just Muslims who take the Islamic religion seriously’ does seem to be both more common and more pernicious than the alternatives.

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” (Page 218)

Ah, but you’re forgetting your Humpty Dumpty:

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.

The term Islamofacism was an invented because the term “theocracy”, although more techincally accurate, simply does not pack the emotional punch that “Facism” does. Its the same reason people around here use the terms “social justice” to describe ‘taking shit from one guy and giving it to another’. So, considering many of you play the same game, I find all these complaints to be so much worthless bullshit.

I think ‘jihadism’ and ‘salifism’ [better: Salafis or Salafiyah] are not just ‘theological’ terms, indeed, they are better described as jurisitic and political categories, and thus al Qaeda is a religio-political movement of a kind of Muslim(s), however much we might find resources from within Islamic tradtions to articulate a normative critique of this or that aspect or claim made by its leadership. Indeed, from the earliest period of Islam, theological controversies, for better and worse, often entailed or reflected political conflict. The obsession with ‘lesser jihad’ by contemporary Islamists reflects the clear intertwining of religion and politics often found in the Islamic tradition, although one might certainly argue with (contest, oppose) the manner in which this jihad has been interpreted and applied by al Qaeda and kindred movements. The definition quoted above from wikipedia by Abb1 is in the main correct (although, with my former teacher Juan E. Campo, I find not a few problems with the notion of ‘fundamentalism’ being used in an Islamic context).

Some Muslims have plausibly argued that al Qaeda (and thus by implication, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizbullah, Hamas, etc.) represents the unwarranted ‘politicization’ of Islam, and there is much to be said for such arguments. Nonetheless, there is some textual warrant and historical precedent from within Islam for not segregating the political (broadly or generously conceived) and religious realms in the sense that the latter might be consigned to the private arena of everyday intimate social life (hence, for Muslims there’s some truth in the slogan that the ‘personal is political’ although by this their meaning is not quite—or typically—that of feminists). This is an enormously complicated subject that presumes an intimate acquaintance with Islamic history and traditions, so I cannot pretend to have addressed matters in any but the most superficial sense….

I don’t need to: #25 just did. In short: ‘Empower the authentic German culture and nation, by getting rid of those sinister foreign Bolsheviks and Jews, and anything touched by them’.