Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

My position-taking, at times, is a bit of a high-wire act. In recent days and weeks, my opposition to religious belief has been laid out in some depth (see the comments here and here for the most recent examples). In the somewhat more distant past, on the other hand, Billy and I have exchanged blows over my “political correctness,” or my tendency at times to call for restraint where others might perceive a free speech interest (most notably here).

There’s a fairly obvious tension here, and it comes to a head with issues like Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which is coming up this Monday. It was started by conservative academic David Horowitz in an effort to “confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the War on Terror and that global warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat.”

Joshua Cohen, a professor at Stanford and the editor of the Boston Review, and Glenn Loury, a professor at Brown, discussed the week on bloggingheads.tv (a fantastic site that everybody should visit regularly) here (the whole diavlog is good, but this the part about Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week). Watch the whole discussion, but what caught my attention in particular was this exchange:

Cohen: There’s a long tradition of thinking that Nazism was Christo-fascism, [that] this was Christian antisemitism. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, but there’s a long tradition of thinking that by sincere and decent people, that this is Christian antisemitism’s ultimate expression. Now, I think it would be awful if people stopped talking about Nazis and the Holocaust in Germany and started talking about the Holocaust committed by the Christo-fascists, even though you can argue the case that those were the roots of that. And I think it’s absurd to think that Christians, whether Catholics or Protestants, whatever their form of Christianity, who think that the Holocaust was…a hideous evil, would say, “Oh, you know, Christo-fascism, that doesn’t mean me.” They’d be offended by it, they’d be disgusted by it. And the idea that it’s okay to talk about Islamo-Fascism because there are people who make a defense from within Islam for the use of terror[ist] bombings, that that makes it okay to talk about Islamo-fascism, I think that’s ridiculous, as ridiculous as thinking that it’s okay to stop talking about Nazism and start talking about Christo-fascism.

Loury: Yeah, well, you know, when 50 Cent, the rapper, was being questioned aggressively about the use of “bitches” and “hoes” and all that kind of rhetoric, his answer on one occasion was, “Well, you know, there really are bitches and hoes in the ghetto.” And, I mean, the fallacy of the reasoning is that because one might be able to find an instance in which someone’s behavior might be more or less accurately described with one of these pejorative terms doesn’t undo the damage that’s done to an entire class of people by the routine use of the term… And the fact that there are Islamists who behave like fascists doesn’t undo what seems to me to be the damage done by the easy, widespread, public evocation of this construction.

This is tricky territory for me, since I’m always eager to point to Islamist terrorists as an example of how religion can damage a culture, but at the same time, I have to agree with Cohen and Loury on this. Disagreeing with religion because it can lead to dangerous ideas is entirely separate from using a term that helps to equate an entire religion with an evil ideology. I believe that religion in all forms hurts people, and that even moderate Muslims should abandon their faith since even their moderate adherence to religion enables a harmful method of thought. But nuance is essential here, and sensitivity to members of all religious faiths is paramount if atheists such as myself are to have any hope of not being pegged as hateful and intolerant. That goes for Christians, Jews, and everybody else as well.

It is wrong, therefore, to argue that Islam causes radical, terrorist ideologies, which the use of the term “Islamo-fascism” implies. It’s important, I think, for people not to make that mistake, or to make the mistake of arguing that Christianity causes homophobia or sexism. More accurately, religion enables these hateful ideologies, is used to justify these ideologies, and, most importantly, constructs an impenetrable wall around these ideologies because religion does not subject itself to reasoned analysis.

I don’t want to get into yet another debate over religion (we’ve covered that ground ad nauseam). I would, however, be interested in hearing some discussion on the use of the term “Islamo-fascism,” and whether it’s a term that is appropriate to use in our discourse.