Look What Appeared in the Newspaper the same Day I wrote about "Islamofascists" !!

Bush’s misuse of ‘fascism’ is indicative of dangerous path U.S. policy is taking
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
GEORGIE ANNE GEYER

In some of history’s super-secret governments, those who would seek knowledge are generally relegated to reading tea leaves or discovering secret messages written in lemon juice on parchment. How lucky we are! All we need to do to figure out what in God’s name our government is going to do next is listen to how President Bush’s words have changed.

If you haven’t noticed, the newest catch phrase is Islamic fascism. The president has repeated it innumerable times; it’s a mantra meant to explain everything, as a third of Lebanon is bashed to bits in our name. He seems to savor the very taste of it on his tongue: Islaaamic fassschism. Sure scares me!

And why not? It is his way of signaling that any young Muslim who doesn’t like him (or freedom, for goodness’ sake) is almost certainly a fascist: a political untouchable after World War II, a pestilence upon the land that can be eliminated only by U.S. and Israeli air forces wiping out the soil upon which he feeds.

But Bush has used the word with the kind of casualness about meaning that only he can conjure up. Fascism came out of Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Fascism meant a centralized autocracy, a nationalist regime with severely nationalist policies and regimentation of industry, commerce and finance, rigid censorship and the brutal suppression of the opposition. Fascism in Europe was also tied, by blood and not religion, to one people or one nationality.

Sorry, W, the Muslim radicals you are talking about are about as far from fascism as they are from communism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism or Hinduism. Al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad or the Taliban: Virtually all are, at least in origin, stateless groups. Nationality means nothing to them. They are scattered like choking bits of dust across the globe, in tiny secret cells, each operating on its own, each with its own interpretation of jihad. Commerce and finance exist only insofar as they serve their militant needs.

So why would the president, no master of words even when playing his hand well, employ such an easily knockeddown concept to characterize what he obviously means to be the next target of his imperial wars in the Middle East after Afghanistan, Iraq and now Lebanon? Simple. Because he thinks it links him to his father’s great cause, World War II; it makes any destructive thing he does acceptable, and at a time when most Americans want to lower the stakes, it gives him reason to up them.

But Islamic fascism is not the only dangerous misuse of language since the Lebanon war began. The Israelis have kept saying — and Washington backed them up in their lethal foolishness — that this time they are going to deal with the "root causes" of Hezbollah in this "different kind of war."

Instead, they have again dealt with the symptoms of the Middle East crisis, the offshoots of Israel’s 1982 invasion and consequent occupation of Lebanon. It’s the same manner they use to deal with the symptoms of the Palestinians’ anti-Israelism — by killing and dehumanizing more Palestinians. Addressing the root causes would mean returning to negotiating the Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty that one could almost touch in the mid-’90s; but we are dealing now with people who like war.

At the same time, the United States and Israel, linked in the mind of the world like twins born with one body, keep insisting that Hezbollah and Hamas — and perhaps soon, the Shiite Sadr Army in Baghdad — can and must never become the state. Yet, history is filled with transitory guerrilla forces that became the political parties and armies of independent states. Examples include North Vietnam, Algeria, East Pakistan, South Africa, Oman and even in Israel itself (the Irgun terrorists became the Likud Party).

From the very beginning of its state, Israel has despised the Arabs so frightfully that it could never call them, or their actions, by the right name; Israel is still "amazed" and "surprised" at having run up against a counterinsurgency capability in southern Lebanon, yet it has fought one counterinsurgency after another since its formation in 1947.

So the United States, with all of its God-given blessings, finds itself in an extraordinary position: square in the middle of a war that will go on in the Middle East forever. That means we have given up our real position of power, which allows us to come in from outside and negotiate and decide.

And if the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh is right (he usually is), the United States collaborated with Israel to start the Lebanon war to get Hezbollah rockets out of the way before we invade Iran.

Meanwhile, the false words that our leaders employ to distract and mislead us go on and on. (Six months in Iraq . . . no insurgency . . . no civil war . . . roots of the problem . . . Islamic fascism) Using the right words to define an action is a hard thing to do, particularly when essentially you’re lying.

Georgie Anne Geyer writes for Universal Press Syndicate.