Language Matters

Dafydd ab Hugh has begun blogging as Big Lizard and has a post up today on Why I Don’t Write “Islamofascist”.  He makes some excellent points:

But the more important point is that the word "fascism" has a magical power: it overwhelms every other word you connect it to. In the real world, "Islamofascism" transsubstantiates into (islamo)-FASCISM! Kaboom!

The danger we face is Islamism and the willingness to murder hundreds of thousands in the name of jihad. What matters is the religion itself and the militancy by which it's spread -- not some putative connection to Mussolini or Hitler. To understand the jihadi, we need to confront the true source of the danger: the death cult that animates the slayer-of-thousands.

I agree with him that the danger we face stems from the religion of Islam and not from any particular economic view they hold.  However, I disagree with him on the implications of his technical parsing of fascism.  I posted a comment on his blog:

I have some concerns about militant Islamist as a replacement for Islamofascist. As a Psychoanalyst, I agree that words matter crucially. The problem for me is two fold.

First, as pbswatcher points out, differentiating a militant Islamist from the vast majority of Muslims who support them to varying degrees is an undertaking likely to fail. While it may be true that we are in the early stages of a clash of civilizations, it is in every civilized person's interest to do whatever we can to avoid that clash becoming overt and universal. As long as we are able to frame the war as being between the Democratic West and those who actively are trying to kill us and recreate the Caliphate, we have a chance to keep those who merely passively support the Islamists from taking a more active role.
Secondly, while you are technically correct that fascism refers to an economic system, I think that that has become a bit of an archaic usage, replaced by a more general sense of fascism=right wing totalitarianism. RWT may not be terribly meaningful, technically, in this context but it is easily understandable to mean those who want to institute a dictatorship of them over us (with the them and us being relatively easily identified.)
In the interest of avoiding making the war explicitly "America against Islam", I believe Islamic fascism works better as a construction. In the streets of Iraq, they know a dictatorship when they see it. They can easily see that we are not interested in installing an infidel, Crusader dictatorship; as well, they are able to easily contrast this with al Qaeda, who have installed dictatorial systems wherever they have held sway in Iraq. The distinction is crucial, lends itself to the idea of fascism as a synonym for totalitarianism, and preserves, to my mind, the distinction we need between the masses of Islam and the violent totalitarians of militant Islamism.

I have written before (A Ticking Clock) about the importance of maintaining the distinction between the enemy actively fighting us around the world and the mass of mainstream Muslims, many of whom support them passively.  As long as there is a chance to avoid what often seems to be a world wide Clash of Civilizations, we should do all in our power to do so.   The discussion of exactly who we are fighting is a valuable one and warrants further discussion.