July 24, 2005
Required Reading Times 10
Oriana Fallaci speaks (hat tip to Mystery Achievement for the translation, and Roger Simon for promulgating):
Mystery Achievement: "The Enemy We Treat Like A Friend" (Part I)
Mystery Achievement: "The Enemy We Treat Like A Friend" (Part II)
Talking point: what if Islamic Nazism (Fallaci's term) was of a purely secular nature? Would we be better able (and willing) to fight? Just as there were good Germans in Hitler's Germany, good Italians in Mussolini's Italy, and good Japanese in Hirohito's Japan, there are good Muslims in the Islamic body politic. Yet with the fabric of religion interwoven into this conflict, a conflict that does not recognize traditional national boundaries, we must find a way to recognize and defeat this enemy. The first is to name the enemy, and in consequence, name the war.
It is not technically incorrect to call this conflict the War on Terror; the West dearly wants to end terrorism. However, to name the war for a technique and not the ideology that embraces the technique is to not know what we are fighting. A war on terror would logically include fighting Basque separatists in Spain, the IRA in the United Kingdom, and a whole host of countries in which terror is used against its citizenry, such as North Korea, Zimbabwe, the countries of the West African Gold Coast, and many more. As much as there are horrific events in all of these countries, and as much as we may get involved in any one of them either unilaterally or multilaterally, they are not a part of this War on Terror.
Oriana Fallaci has correctly named the enemy: Islamic Nazism (the term Islamic Fascism has sometimes been used, but I think this is a misnomer: it is not traditional fascism that the Islamic radicals are embracing; it is very much an extreme brand of National Socialism, or Nazism). Whether Bush, or Blair, or Howard, or even Kofi, Kerry, or Clinton can call this war by its name, the War on Islamic Nazism, remains to be seen.
Posted by nopundit at July 24, 2005 05:58 PM