I read the comments to my columns every week on The Daily Reveille’s Web site.
I know it might not seem that way since I never respond to them, but I promise you – I read them, and I appreciate everyone who comments. I take all criticisms into account. And sometimes, I’m even compelled to address legitimate concerns raised by our Internet readers.
This is one of those times.
There is a distressing tendency amongst Daily Reveille online commenters to use the word “Islamofascist” to describe the militant jihadist Muslims who commit terrorist attacks. It’s not surprising: the word is everywhere, and the word is cheap.
I don’t want to get all preachy here, but let’s be real for a minute.
Islamofascism is an empty concept, the result of focus groups figuring out a way to call people “bad” without stating how they actually are bad. It’s a political boogeyman, existing solely to make people think less clearly – or, to be blunt, to make people not think at all.
I’m not saying I think terrorists are A-K or the terrorists are all good people who just need to be understood. The fact that I have to specify this in contemporary America to avoid hate mail is a sad indictment of the vacuity of our political discourse.
With all the hoopla surrounding Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize, it’s easy to forget that receiving a Nobel Prize is more than just a political event to be dissected by the luminaries of Fox News’ primetime programming. It’s a big freaking deal, and it’s not always about world peace. Harold Pinter received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, and his thoughts about language explain why we shouldn’t throw around a label like “Islamofascist” before thinking about what it really means – if it means anything at all.
Pinter, in his Nobel lecture, said the following: “It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay.” Although Pinter was addressing President Bush’s predilection to invoke “the American people” every three minutes, it applies here too.
Let’s make no bones about it: “Islamofascism” is a racist term, a fact baldly seen in the word’s origin. Little needs to be said about “fascism,” of course, but “Islamist” merits attention. It is an appellation that harkens back to its colonial and Orientalist origins in the 17th century, when Muslims were “Mohammedans” and all sex was missionary.
The popularity of the term should be shocking to no one after Sept. 11 “changed everything.” America needed a big bad guy to hate. Muslims worked, I suppose, because their fringe elements killed thousands of people.
So we had a new big bad guy in town, but our punditry class just didn’t know what to call them. “Militant fundamentalist Muslims” was too much for Sean Hannity to sound out phonetically, and anyway it made viewers think messy thoughts.
Instead, we got “Islamofascist,” a good compound word.
Because, you see, Islamists are fundamentalists who believe their religion justifies the way the world should work and determines the political and military policies for temporal leaders. They’re also quite, quite bad. Fascists, on the other hand, wear black shirts. They are also quite, quite bad.
Thus, we have a new word.
It’s quite a bit catchier than “doubleplusungood” and about as honest.
Regardless, the term is offensive, its usage disingenuous, and its very existence corrosive to the intellectual well-being of the body politic. The reference to fascism is needless, a construct instituted solely because American fundamentalist Christians found it problematic that the jihadists in question were just as fundamentalist in their beliefs as our own abortion-clinic bombers.
I don’t blame them – it’s a troubling thought. So, rather than focusing on the legitimate questions the terrorist attacks have raised about fundamentalism in the present age, we got “Islamofascism.”
But I still want answers to the questions no one wants to answer. Fundamentalism is universal and found in adherents of every faith in every country. The question is not why Sept. 11 happened, but how can we prevent it from ever happening again, the faith of the perpetrators be damned?
We can’t change the past. The Twin Towers are still rubble, and the Manhattan skyline will never be the same. Can we hope for a better future when our political leaders and legitimate press can’t even be bothered to properly identify the people who attacked America?
Of course, you can’t reduce that to a sound-bite. I guess if I were a Fox News pundit, I’d change the words, too, and hope no one noticed.
After all, I don’t know the answers, either.
In the end, I suppose we can only echo Pinter and shake our heads: “It’s so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.”
—Contact Neal Hebert at [email protected]