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Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

by yaman salahi

During the week of October 22nd, the David Horowitz Freedom Center is hosting “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” on college campuses around the country. The events, which are taking place at a time when neoconservative policies are at their least popular moment, are geared towards shifting the public’s attention away from America’s wars abroad, and towards the alleged threat that “Islamo-Fascism” poses to the “civilized world.”

One of the main purposes of the week is to challenge the position of Muslims in the United States with regards to American foreign policy. Muslims alone are being asked to prove their loyalty to the United States, at the risk of being considered a fifth column.

While such demands are often masqueraded in simple fancy ideals, their function is to push Muslims into political complicity. For example, while the Week’s petition calls for “the right of all people to live in freedom and dignity,” “the freedom of the individual conscience,” “the equality of dignity of women and men,” and “the right of all people to live free from violence,” it also requires signatories to confirm that “the goal of Islamo-Fascist jihad is world domination” and “the suppression of all Infidels.” Furthermore it requires that signatories agree that “the Islamo-Fascist Jihad” is a “war against Women, Gays, Christians, and Jews.”

Challenging the petition simply by looking at the people who support it is an easy exercise. Since when have people like Ann Coulter and Rick Santorum, for example, been at the forefront of the struggle for gay rights and women’s emancipation in America? Since when has Coulter, who said of Muslims that “we should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them all to Christianity,” and of Jews that they should convert to Christianity to be “perfected,” believed in a right to be free from violence or to choose one’s own religion?


What may not be so obvious, however, is the function of the petition. In tying the mentioned ideals to specific political positions, the petition reveals its true goal: to intimidate and bully Muslim Americans into political obeisance and silence. In the petition’s view, any reasoned attempt to consider so-called jihadists on their own terms, rather than with language that we have made up for them, is automatically framed as apologetic at best or, at worst, subversive. The effect, then, is that Muslims are not being asked to prove their loyalty to supposedly noble ideals, or even to the US, but rather, to present US foreign policy.

If we want to draw informed and informative conclusions about foreign movements or foreign societies, we have to start by studying those societies and drawing what we can out of them. We cannot bring our own categories--ethnic, political, sexual, anything--to them, and expect to understand them with our categories. The categories we have been asked to use are insufficient, and we must challenge their adequacy.

We should be especially suspicious when those who have offered such categories are unwilling to let them go. There is a reason: implicit in these categories of “terrorist,” of “Islamo-Fascist,” and of “Global Jihad,” are actual political policies. That is, these labels do not end up giving us useful information about the objects they are applied to: they do not tell us about those objects. Rather, they tell us how to act towards those objects.

Even if I agree that some distant society or government, for example, is “Islamo-Fascist,” so what? It still remains as mysterious, distant, and unknown to me as it was in the first place. I have learned nothing new about it. I have, however, learned that it is bad, and that something must be done about it, especially if it’s out to get me.

What we need to recognize, then, is that with such categorization, also comes a specific prescription of action. That course of action, once enabled by the label, becomes almost unavoidable unless the terrain of the discussion is shifted to alternative terms. The label and the prescription are virtually inseparable.

Once we see this pattern in the discourse of the fringe clowns at the Freedom Center, we can begin to recognize its subtler and more sophisticated manifestations in mainstream and Western liberal discourse. These instances require our more immediate attention, as they pose a greater threat than Horowitz’ traveling circus ever will.

Yaman Salahi is a student at UC Berkeley. He blogs at http://www.yamansalahi.com/.