Islamophilia

by G. Murphy Donovan (April 2025)

 

Islamophobia is a word created by fascists, used by cowards, to manipulate morons. —Christopher Hitchins

 

The rising of the Internet is spawning a plethora of mixed blessings. The democratization of writing is not without hazard. Alas, you have a regular opportunity to make an ass out of yourself in public. Indeed, the internet is also a bit like old school report cards, or misdemeanor rap sheets; matters of permanent public record.

With social media, getting hung by your own petard, or other appendages, is trending.

Then there are those trolls! Loosely defined, a troll is a provocateur who surfs the web looking for an argument. Their commentary is often, but not always, abrasive, vulgar, and often hostile.

Comments, like content, usually have editors to screen the obvious abuses. Sometimes commentary is simply arbitrary. Nonetheless, a single word might provoke a thread or a fusillade of like-minded vitriol.

“Islamism” is one of those words.

Words matter.

Alas, neologisms come into the language all the time, especially when the geopolitical terrain is volcanic. Ironically, polemicists, on the rural Right and urban Left, both abhor words like Islamism or Islamist.

Liberals believe words like “Islamism” unfairly links Moslem radicals or terrorists with an alleged, yet innocent, religion of “peace” (sic).

Not too long ago, team Obama and John Brennan’s CIA for example, would have you believe that mayhem in Mohamed’s name has nothing to do with Islam. Such assertions were a little like claiming that the archipelagos of historical assassins, historical Moslem terror campaigns, historical Islamic imperialism, and perennial Moslem jihads, are all inspired  by local and unhappy Rotarians.

The thought police at the White House, at CIA, DOD, and the State Department, and  an ever woke media, have stricken words like Islamism and Islamist from their reporting and analysis by fiat.

Recall, if you will, Barrack Hussein Obama’s foreign policy speech in Cairo; taking a knee before Arabs and the Ummah, in the wake of 9/11, literally apologizing to the Moslem world for the sins of America and the West.

Looking at that speech today, we note that POTUS concluded with two quotes about “peace” from the Talmud and Bible. Apparently, Obama couldn’t find a suitable peace quote to cite from the Koran.

Irony is such a bitch.

Still today, in the wake of yet another Islamic genocidal campaign against Israel, the American and European Left seem to believe that candor and truth about Islam, or worst still the action that truth might require, will make the Moslem problem worse.

Indeed, rhetorical appeasement of Mecca under Donald Trump is still the drum roll offered up by the media, the EU, the UN, and now even Commonwealth mandates. Truth telling about Islam today is literally a felony in many European or Commonwealth countries.

If the “clash of civilizations” is real; clearly the West is losing.

The American Right, on the other hand, suspect the “ism” is a hedge, a reluctance to call a spade a spade. Some critics would have you believe that Islam and its adherents are coherent; a kind of terrorist, propaganda, and religious monolith.

Here ends are confused with means.

The objective of imperial Islam may be monoculture. Yet, with 2 billion adherents in over some 49 odd countries, realities will always be at odds with Utopian or theological wet dreams. The Shia/Sunni schism, for example, has plagued the Ummah for 1300 years.

To suggest that all Muslims are militant radicals, or terrorists, is more than a little like a farmer confusing the bulls with goats.

In fact, when characterizing the Islamist problem, both sides often miss the point. We might capture the dilemma by suggesting that the Left has its head in the sand while the Right has its head where the sun seldom shines; ultimately, distinctions without a difference.

Arabs, Persians, Moslems, and the Islamic commentators use words like Islamism and jihad every day, whilst the West demurs.

Why is that?

Islamism, as opposed to Islam, suggests movement and militancy. You might well think of Islamists as Muslim crusaders, theological imperialists. Such distinctions are self-evident when militants are parsed from the so-called “moderate” majority. The passive plurality, in turn, are happy to be distanced from the knives, bombers, child molesters—and those bestial beards of prey who get all the press.

Nevertheless, words we choose for obfuscation do little to moderate the danger of a genuine menace.

If only ten percent of Moslems (49 countries, 2 billion adherents) are religious fascists, the global threat is substantial by any measure.

Neologisms are born when ordinary language fails to capture a phenomenon or an idea. Terms like Islamism and “Islamofascism” fill voids of meaning.

Still, the majority of Moslems are probably not terrorists; they are worse. Passive aggressors, not moderates, might be a better description for the mute Islamic majority.

How many Russians were Communists? How many Germans were Nazis in the beginning? How many folks thought Biden and Harris were real leaders in the free world?

If history is precedent, most of the guilty among us will never see justice.

And toxic numbers never have to be large. Militancy and terror are usually a minority, yet aggressive minorities often prevail. A kinetic vanguard can always depend on the silence and apathy of majorities. Apathy is the loudest and most telling voice in any political forum, especially in democracies like America.

US voting participation statistics are mute indictments of the smug and indifferent among us.

Withal, beards with Toyotas, knives, and bombs are the lesser of two evils. We know what they believe, what they fight for, and we see what they do on a daily basis in the Levant and elsewhere.

Terror makes no secret of its fanaticism or religious inspiration today.

Whatever the number of Moslem “radicals,” they will never be as numerous, as mute, or as guilty, as the larger Ummah. A Moslem everyman is routinely disingenuous, routinely apathetic, routinely absolved, routinely hypocritical, and routinely given a pass on financing religious terror, and proxy sedition.

Most Americans and Europeans seem to believe that most Moslems are innocents. Indeed, today you will often hear the absurd assertion that less than 8 million Israelis are abusing 2 billion Moslems.

Sadly, the great crimes of any century are more a function of apathy and appeasement, and less a product of militancy. Apathy and denial about the Islamic ideology is as much of a poison pill in the smug West as it is in the sclerotic dysfunctional East.

A malignant political force, once set in motion, tends to stay in motion unless confronted by an equal or superior force (hat tip to Isaac). The real strength of Islamists is the apathy of 59 Moslem nations and 2 billion naïfs worldwide, a fifth of the world’s population.

Islamofascism is a global social disease metastasizing in slow motion just below the radar of global conscience. Albeit, some polities, Beijing and Moscow are examples, have no illusions about the seditious or terror threats from Islam.

Any distinction between political and religious fascism today is a distinction without a difference.

The progressive West cannot save Islam from itself. Yet, liberal Democracies may die trying. Appeasement is the perennial poison pill for republics and oligarchies alike.

Calling Islamists “nefarious characters,” criminals, militants, radicals, fundamentalists, or even terrorists is a kind of obfuscation. Such terms are half-truths, approach avoidance symptoms as the psychobabble industry might say. Proselytizers, apologists, and jihadists should be tied precisely, directly, and routinely to their ideology, theocracies, and cultures of origin.

That culture is clearly Islam where religion and politics are joined at the hip!

Islamic ideology is primary villain midst James Clapper’s and John Brennan’s “nefarious” unnamed characters. With the advent of American and EU Islamism, western Intelligence communities have been groomed not to call a spade a spade. Many so-called national security experts will tell you we are not a war with Islam: as if 9/11, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Gaza, Lebanon, and now Yemen et al were all unrelated dumpster fires.

Tulsi Gabbard should be taking notes at this point.

So let’s be clear when we speak of the enemy that is Islam. With the Moslem threat, there are probably four relevant semantic or rhetorical distinctions to be made.

Islam is the big tent, the global religious/political culture, for the most part an apathetic, apologetic, passive, maybe bovine, yet racially diverse, majority of passive aggressive religious zealots.

Islamists are the proselytizing militants or financiers, missionaries, domestic or imperial, immigrant activists who believe they act in the name of a “great” religion which has been prophesized to rule and/or replace secular governments, especially democracies like those in Europe and the Americas.

With the West and the EU, religious government used to be the problem. With the Ummah, theology has always been the solution.

Islamofascists are the kinetic Moslems, the fighters who oppress, kill, cut throats, and rape in the name of Mohamed, the Koran, or whatever theocratic claptrap motivates imperial sponsor states like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Emirates, Yemen et al.

Terms of Islamic endearment are related, though not necessarily interchangeable.*

The necessity to distinguish militants from moderates is not trivial. The so-called moderate is the more difficult problem, demographically and ideologically. Islamism is, in the end, a philosophical, political, religious, now kinetic, quest to reverse the vector of Emanuel Kant’s optimism.

Alas, history is in fact a two way street.

And if precedent and success matter, there is more than a little history that supports the effectiveness of irredentist zealotry in the Ummah. At the UN today, theocracies and dictatorships are clear majorities. True republican democracy is not trending, not even in Europe.

Zelensky, Starmer, Macron, and Von der Layen might take a bow here.

Islamophilia and Islamophobia

Withal, new neologisms have creep into language to complicate arguments about Islam. “Islamophobia” has precedence of usage, a term that insists that those two billion Moslems are victims. Islamophilia, on the other hand, is that habit of European mind and rhetoric that dismisses any Islamic social perversion, depravity, or criminal atrocity in the name of culture or tolerance.

DEI has, in practice, become an ever ready basket of excuses for criminals, jihadists, and socialist nitwits of all stripes. The merge of the socialist Left and the Islamist Right has, for the most part, gone unnoticed by the academy and the pandering schoolmarms of pandering Political “Science.”

The passage of time is not progress.

Another Dark Age is still possible. The vector of history moves forward—or backwards. Contemporary Islamofascism is a very large sanguinary bet on door number two, the recidivist option.

And yes, Islamists claim that their aggression is actually defensive, a victim’s posture readily endorsed at the UN and EU. Just the other day, the British Prime Minister claimed that Islamophobia, not anti-Semitism, was the real toxin in UK politics.

Let’s allow that historical slander for the moment.

Muslim scholars and clerics have indeed been looking to the past in search of the future for centuries. Recidivism, yea political stasis, is the fatal flaw of all utopians, especially fascists; particularly religious zealots and fearful ninnies like Keir Starmer and Emanuel Macron.

Unfortunately, the predicate of all fascisms, politcal or religious, is coercion. Thus we live in a world where the swords of Allah, Islam, Mecca, and Mohamed are poised over the necks of naïve republics and autocracies alike on every continent.

Fear is a jihadist’s most effective ally.

There is no question that imperial Islam will fail—implode or be defeated. The question is how much masochism, denial, and pain the Ummah and the civilized world will endure before that day arrives.

_________

* Some of the best rationales for using terms like Islamism and Islamofascism often come, ironically, from prescient writers on the American Left. See Christopher Hitchen’s seminal essay in Slate.

 

 

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G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of Intelligence and National security. Follow him on X.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast