Could It Happen Here?
By Dr. Ghulam M. Haniff
St. Cloud, MN

Among the plethora of name-calling words from the neo-conservative propaganda machine none has elicited greater reaction than the President George Bush’s recent use of the term “Islamic fascists.” The maturing Muslim community in America sees the objective in that usage the attempt to malign the followers of Islam, to isolate and demonize them.
The Christian fundamentalist and the radical right agenda has been and continues to be to make Islam disappear from America. They have recently found allies, with interests in the Middle East, to launch a strengthened joint effort to badger Islam until it is expunged from the country.
Nothing could be more absurd than hanging the label of fascism on the Muslims. Fascism is based on the worship of the state, the nation-state, as an object of adulation and highest loyalty. It is an idea rejected by the teachings of the Qur’an.
The notion of fascism is a product of European racist thinking in the context of corporate industrial state. However, the seed of this idea goes back to the white man’s encounter with the “natives” half millennium ago.
The intention in linking fascism with Islam is to attribute the horror and bloodshed of the European making that created havoc in much of the world about half a century ago, to the present day Muslims. It is a disingenuous attempt to connect Islam with the “evil” that prevailed in that conflict. The neo-conservatives are out to invent an enemy without which the present neo-colonial venture cannot be sustained.
Many labels have been developed to equate Muslims with barbarians, savages, fascists and even racists to irreversibly demean them in the eyes of the world. That message is communicated around the globe on a daily basis and has become the standard currency of discourse in almost every European country.
The terminology neo-conservatives employ stigmatizes Muslims in an ugly way that ought to be unacceptable in any civilized society. Derogatory labels used to denigrate groups are odious, hateful and hurtful.
It is said that name-calling portends ominous signs for the targeted community. In recent years Muslims have openly speculated about their future and see historical parallels with cultural groups on the receiving end of hate in Europe of the twentieth century.
Historians tell us that the building of crematoriums in Germany did not begin with mortar and bricks. It started with the use of words. The words used, and the phrases turned out, taunted and demonized a whole community until they were equated with “evil” and their elimination considered desirable. That systematic killing, known as the holocaust, of a religious minority was meant to expunge the “devils” from contaminating the racially “pure” Germans.
Words or phrases have a power of their own. They construct and define reality. The Germany of 1920s showed the world how stigmatizing labels can put a community under pressure and hasten its destruction. The model created at that time on the assumption of the white man’s inherent racial superiority is at work again right in front of our eyes. Fascism and racism are the two sides of the same coin responsible for slavery, colonialism and countless genocidal wars that the white man has imposed on the rest of the world.
The concept of fascism was first defined and applied by Benito Mussolini in the 1920s. Its best definition comes from the book ‘The Anatomy of Fascism’, authored by Professor Robert Paxton of Columbia University. Its essential ideas boil down to the presence of siege mentality in an aggrieved nation that looks for ways to assert itself without regard for legal and moral restraints. It thrives on foreign conquests with support from the jingoistic elements in the society. It demands loyalty and any equivocation is condemned as traitorous.
None of the Muslim groups, or countries, opposing the US venture in the Middle East fit that model, nor do the Muslims of America, yet they are all painted with the same broad brush of fascism.
One neo-conservative has argued that to compare today’s Islamic militants with last century’s fascists “gets at the incredibly aggressive nature of the conflict, the craziness of it” with implications that “these are not rationally calculating people.”
In a speech to the American Legion in Utah the President argued that Islamic militants are the successors of fascism, Nazism, communism and totalitarianism. These enemies are no different from the ones in World War II.
The war fever that has been generated under the pretense of fighting ‘the third world war’ against global enemies is now brimming with hatred for anything Muslim.
The Democles’ sword of annihilation is hanging over their heads and it behooves them to think about the unthinkable. That unthinkable is the probability of a holocaust of the Muslims in America resembling the European experience. The template perfected in that era was recently used to initiate genocide against the Muslims in Bosnia.
Perhaps a preview of what could happen in this country was dramatized by the movie ‘The Siege’ that played in your neighborhood theaters just a few short years ago.
If Muslims don’t assert their rights to fight back, build coalitions and make activism their frontier than all hope is lost. Like the victims of Nazi Germany if they just beg for their lives they are already half-way to the gas chambers.


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Editor: Akhtar M. Faruqui
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