MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Last Thursday, the day we learned of a plot to blow up airplanes from London, bound for cities in the United States, President Bush said this.
President GEORGE W. BUSH: …our fellow citizens are now learning about, are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will…
BRAND: Islamic fascists. That phrase is a deliberate attempt by the White House to be more specific when describing the enemy, an enemy previously described simply as terrorists.
The term has angered many in the Muslim world. They see it as tarring their entire religion, and everyone who practices it, as fascist. Here's Middle East expert Juan Cole.
Mr. JUAN COLE (Middle East Expert): I think it's despicable. I think Islam is a great religious tradition encompassing 1.3 billion people. Linking the word Islam, or Islamic, with a pejorative term such as fascism is extremely unfair. In fact, it is a form of racism.
BRAND: And it reminds Juan Cole of another inflammatory remark the president made just after September 11, 2001, when he characterized America's war against terrorism as a crusade. Its implications of Christians going to war against Muslims alarmed a lot of people. The president backed away from that word.
This time he was more careful. Johns Hopkins Middle East Studies chair Fouad Adjami, a Shiite Muslim, says the White House actually consulted him.
Mr. FOUAD ADJAMI (Middle East Studies, Johns Hopkins University): It was actually floated past me, I mean people asked me what I thought of this term, and is that a good term, and…
BRAND: People in the White House?
Mr. ADJAMI: Yes, yes. I know that there are people who it offends Muslims. I don't think so. I mean, what's the offense here? And there are people waiting to be offended. They want to be offended. They're eager to be offended.
President Bush didn't invent the term. A Lexis-Nexis search found the first time it was used in the mainstream press was back in 1979, in a Washington Post article describing Iran's Ayatollah Khomeni as an Islamic Fascist. Since then, the phrase has morphed into Islam-o-fascist. That word appeared in a 1990 article in the British newspaper, The Independent, which argued that authoritarian governments are the norm in the Islamic world.
But how can a small group of alleged terrorists living in London be Islamic Fascists? Doesn't the term fascism imply a central government, whipping the populace into a nationalistic frenzy? Paul Berman has written a lot about this history. He's the author of the book Terror and Liberalism. He says when fascism arose in Europe in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, similar movements cropped up in the Arab world.
Mr. PAUL BERMAN (Author, Terror and Liberalism): And those movements were different from the European movements, but had a similar mythology; a similar paranoid conspiracy theory of world events; similar cult of hatred for specialized populations; and ultimately a similar cult of death.
BRAND: In Egypt, a group called the Muslim Brotherhood formed in the 1920s. It's desires? Create a unified Islamic theocracy and crush the Zionist movement. The group schooled many young radicals, including Ayman al-Zawahiri -now the Number two man in al-Qaida and considered the brains of the group.
That's why Paul Berman says President Bush's use of the term Islamic Fascists to describe al-Qaida-influenced terrorists is apt.
Mr. BERMAN: It can give us first a sense of the scale of the danger that we're facing. And also, by seeing these points of similarity, we can be alerted to ways in which we can struggle against these movements.
BRAND: And as many have noted since 9/11, it's a struggle being waged as much in the media as on the ground. The night after President Bush made his remark, al-Jazzier television devoted an hour of programming reacting to it. Listeners who called in said they were infuriated. Since then, Western columnists have used it, but so far no one in the White House has publicly repeated it.
BRAND: Stay with us on DAY TO DAY from NPR News.
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