Talk:Term:Islamofascism

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People need a useful label and Islamism is a useful label. Perhaps it doesn't make a lot of disrtinctiosn between those who want to take power solely thorugh votes from those who want to mix votes and bullets ir just abandon votes for bullets alone. I wonder whether Democrats to distinguish were attempting to make comparable disintctions between Italian fascism, National Socialism, Spanish and Lebanese Falangism, French and Belgian integralism etc. in the 1930s. That they all bore a family resemblance to one another was probably enough to label them fascism and it is probably enough to know that all the various strains if Islamism are part of an authoritarian poliitcal-religious movement antithetical to liberal democracy. Thor Speaks

I agree that a useful word is needed, but the problem is that when a word is chosen it suggests a concept and the concept suggested may distort our perceptions of what is really going on.

To understand a phenomenon it is helpful to understand it at its most basic levels. The rainbow of colors that appears in a little oil spill on the surface of a puddle could gets lots of supposed explanations, and probably did, until the nature of light and the phenomenon of interference were investigated.

Why do the Japanese have a society that is pretty strongly hierarchical, that tends to divide itself into tight groups that resent and avoid intrusion by non group members? Why is American society divided along lines that so frequently involve sex and other matters that do not have any necessary impact on the lives of others? Why do traditional Chinese societies produce individuals who are typically well-received world wide, generally regarded as reasonable (barring atypical conflagrations such as the Great Cultural Revolution, which have their own special causes), relatively submissive to authority, etc.? I suppose it is tautological reasoning, but the individuals in these various cultures, on average, are different in ways that reflect the cultures that shaped them as they were growing up.

There are cultural differences within the world of Islam that can be very extreme. The typical behavioral repertoire that one might see among a group of Muslim young people in a Malaysian fishing village is very different from what one might see among a similar group in Pakistan. Even just within the Arab world of Islam there are surely differences.

From my reading regarding the enculturation processes in at least some Arab cultures it seems that there is a considerable body of communities among whom it is common for young people to grow up in a culture that routinely uses, and subjects these children and youths, to deliberate and what in my culture would be regarded as extreme acts of humiliation.

If Japanese people (on average) have one mindset as the result of growing up in a culture that uses threat of ostracism (from "Mommy won't love you any more if you..." to more direct action), Americans (on average) have another mindset as the result of growing up in a culture that inculcates guilt and moral disgust ("He's a rotten kid, Miriam!"), Chinese (on average) have yet another mindset that is produced by a culture that assumes goodness in the individual and points out "unintended" consequences ("I know that you are a good person who loves the members of his community, but I just saw you do such-and-so which seems inconsistent with your good nature. Would you like to reconsider your course of action?"), then it would seem likely that people who grow up in yet another culture would have a character structure that is consistent with that growing environment.

A useful way for ambitious individuals to get control of large numbers of Americans is to threaten them with a guilt trip and offer, as the authority figure, redemption at the cost of conformity to the group. When Americans (or, in the 1930s, Germsns) feel guilt, one response is to project that guilt and self-hatred onto others. "If I am evil, it's o.k. -- because you are much more evil and I hate you for it and will destroy you. Heil Hitler!" "If I am a sinner and have done bad things, it's o.k. because I have been forgiven and because you are a worse sinner than I and have not been saved. Praise God!"

Let us take as a hypothesis the idea that in many Arab communities people have been routinely and deliberately subjected to intense humiliation to "knock them into line." Surely, even in America, some individuals grow up in families where they are subjected to intense humiliation just as others grow up in families where sticks and fists are used to establish control. In the U.S. we have a growing body of information about how children who grow up in abusive environments grow up to beat their own wives, their own husbands, and/or their own children. As far as I know we have not studied the results of intense psychological humiliation.

If someone who has grown up being told that s/he is guilty of original sin, guilty of sexual impulses, guilty of the impulse to steal, etc., etc. has a tendency to want to project that guilt onto other people, and if someone who has grown up being beaten by parents has a tendency to beat his/her own children, what might we expect of someone who has been systematically humiliated throughout his/her life? What defensive means can one use to throw off the humiliation? How will one react to external situations that threaten to humiliate one once again? How will one use one's knowledge of how to humiliate others to make his/her way in the world?

One of the things that psychologists have learned about suicide in Europe and America is that it frequently is an expression of aggression that might more appropriately be directed against one's tormenters, but is such a powerful anger that when external expression is prevented (typically by psychological factors inculcated in the individual's infancy and childhood) it can only be visited upon oneself.

A mixed solution to perceived external tormentors -- groups whose power would ensure the sure punishment of the individual for any effective action taken against them -- is the murder-suicide and more and more frequently the group murder and suicide. "Going postal" is an increasingly important phenomenon in America.

If humiliation is at the root of terrorism of some varieties, that fact may be much more important than any religious texts or traditions that are associated with the terrorism. It is difficult to see how the life of Jesus would inspire hatred of minority populations, but Christianity and the Bible have been taken as the rationale for groups with a hateful agenda. There are enough vengeful passages in the Bible to give cover for the purveyors of hatred in our own culture, and there are passages in the Koran that serve the same purpose. One of the characteristics of hate groups is that they tend not to be interested in reading their religious passages of interest in context of the entirety of their holy texts, much less in context of the revered later figures in their own tradition.

So how should one characterize a group that is strongly motivated (at least in part by irrational factors) to destroy other communities? Can the nature of their target communities be part of the characterization? It would seem that the target communities are ones that they perceive as intruding into their territory, that can be characterized as opposing their religious traditions, that impose their wills on them... (What else?)

Can the intent of their specific actions be a pertinent part of this characterization? The word "terrorism" has been cheapened in recent years to the point that any group that fights against another group can be called "terrorist." By current standards, the French Resistance during World War II might have been called "terrorist."

Attacks against military objectives have clear consequences for practical operations. Blowing up a bridge giving access to a military objective very effectively slows down anybody trying to reach that objective. Blowing up a neighboring opera hall with its 3000 patrons will not have any effect on military operations or the functioning of the postal system, but it will have an effect on the morale of the country. Acts of sabotage are generally regarded as successful if they cripple some essential asset such as a factory. Acts of terrorism are generally regarded as successful if they make the people in the target country believe that they are likely to be next.

What are the objectives of al-Qaida? They rarely have effects that would create significant practical difficulties. Even destruction of the World Trade Center did not interfere with operations in such a way that it benefited the Islamic world or al-Qaida's own operations. Were not fear and humiliation the desired results?

The words we use for similar groups in the U.S. are typically code words. For instance, we call some hate groups "fundamentalist Christian," when they seem neither to understand the fundamentals of the teachings of Jesus nor to behave in a Christian way. We call some highly authoritarian politicians "conservatives," when they do not seek to conserve either economic resources or fundamentally sound basic and historically early structures of the Republic. We give authoritarians, or even crypto-fascists, cover when we dignify their positions with the word "conservative." We give cover to those who would secure their own positions of authority, their own secular authority, etc. by use of similar behavioral levers when we call them Islamic.

Americans have developed ways of talking about those in the Church who have used the words and the resources of the church for personal objectives, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_evangelist_scandals), but none are particularly successful in pinpointing the hypocrisy of claiming a religious identity while violating the precepts of the religion in an egregious way.

The alternative to "Islamofascist" that may have the best credentials is "Salafist," but that term refers to a historical group that tried to return the religion of Islam to its roots and to shuck off accretions of discordant elements.

While I would view any attempt to thrust all "outsiders" out of the United States (there wouldn't be many people left, would there?), the desire of individuals living in traditionally Islamic territories to free those lands of external influences would seem to me to be something that a reasonable person could not disagree with. We have had our own purveyors of "culture wars," and while I think these people are surprisingly lacking in confidence of the strengths of their own tradition, I can easily understand their perceived need to "protect the holy." Some believers in Islam may also believe that Allah needs to be protected against untruths, and that his teaching cannot survive in the marketplace of ideas. That's a pretty pessimistic view, but I can understand it. The idea of the Salafists that early Islam had it right and that later Islamic tradition had been adulterated with errors is the same kind of view.

What, then, are the reasonable bounds of behavior? Can a believer in religion X in the traditional X territory kill all those who come into X territory and push the Y religion? Can believers in religion X go outside X territory and kill believers in Y? Can secular authorities in X territory forbid missionaries of the Y religion from entering, forbid followers of Y religion from conducting supposedly non-religious teaching, healing, or commercial activities in X territory? Without knowing beforehand whether we are making rules for ourselves when we speak of religion X or religion Y, territory X or territory Y, it seems reasonable and prudent to consider that whatever is permitted to one should be permitted to all, and vice-versa.

How would we in the United States feel if a resurgence of Islam led to a great flowering of Islamic civilization, a reawakening of the original scientific impulse led to technological and commercial dominance of the new Caliphate, and then this external group began to interfere with life in our country, to dominate our banking system, to subjugate our commercial organization, to extract our resources, etc.?

We have already seen our own native-born terrorists blow up an entire building full of innocent people, so I suppose that it is not unreasonable to expect that there would be people in this country who would desire to make similar strikes outside our territory.

Maybe what we are dealing with is terrorism with a fascist frosting, terrorism with a Christian frosting, terrorism with an Islamic frosting.

What is the term for someone who is not the king but who forges the king's signature and puts out his own orders as though they came from the king? In the study of theology there ought to be a term for such a misdeed.

What I am picturing mentally is a large lout with a bulldog's studded collar on his neck and other biker regalia, carrying a bishop's crozier or some other symbol of religious authority or perhaps carrying a portrait of himself wearing a halo. Then it would be necessary to find the perfect word to describe that social role. p0m 21:40, 9 July 2008 (EDT)

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This page was last modified 01:40, 10 July 2008 by dKosopedia user Patrick0Moran. Based on work by dKosopedia user(s) Thorvelden. Content is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.