Winds of War: Sorry President Bush – You Still Don’t Get It

“The recent arrests that our fellow citizens are now learning about are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.”

The Right agrees with him and Islamic spokesmen and organizations do not. They criticize Bush’s statement on a number of levels but the main thrust of their ire is that there are no roots of fascism in Islam.

And I agree. There are no more fascism roots in the nation of Islam than there are fascism roots in the nations of Germany, Italy, Japan or nay other country. Nor are there fascist roots in Catholicism, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism, or any other religion.

Now before you start cursing me under your breath, let me explain.

Now this isn’t he first time Bush has refined his view of who the enemy is. Daniel Pipes reported a couple of months ago that in a striking admission, George W. Bush said the other day:

"We actually misnamed the war on terror. It ought to be [called] the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies and who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world."

Back in June of this year, I blogged that said, tongue in cheek, “Good show, George! Except that “the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies and who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world”, is too long to fit on a bumper sticker. It needs to be condensed.”

Bush is correct to identify the war as a clash between two ideologies. That’s what every war in history had been about. So let’s do a simple comparison with war against fascism in World War II.

The ideology of fascist Germany was Nazism. Those that believed in that ideology were called Nazis, the military arm of that ideology were the Wehrmacht.

Now let’s compare.

The enemy we fight today is the ideology of Islamism. Those that believe in that ideology are called Islamists, and their military arm are the jihadists,aka: terrorists. To win the war – any war- is to defeat the enemy ideology.

Islamism is the socio-political arm of the religion of Islam just as the Catholic Church was the socio-political arm of the Holy Roman Empire. To fully recognize our enemy is too understand the roots of Islamism in Islam – not the roots as fascism. Islamism can only be defeated when the religion of Islam itself is reformed – just as the Catholicism was reformed and helped break the power of the Holy Roman Empire and the Church.

The problem with the ideology that threatens us is that we are will not name it and so fascism, in Bush’s mind, equates to terrorists and ignore the just as great bit more insidious non-violent threat of Islamism which is widely supported by your everyday Muslim. Just look at the recent polls of Muslim opinion and you will see a subtle – and sometimes not so subtle –undercurrent of a small percentage that equates to a large number of Muslims living in the free democracies who may not agree with the Jihadist methods, but that are sympathetic to the Islamist agenda.

And that’ the real enemy that Bush has failed to identify – Islamism - and its threat to our Judeo-Christian Western European culture. It must be defined as such and confronted not at just at airport security and Wal-Marts selling cell phones, but standing on watch for every attempt of the Islamist to Islamotize our culture and make it into the Islamist dream of Islam dominating the world and installing Shari Law in those nations to morally and culturally weak to defend against it.

So President Bush. Please, before you exit stage right, call a spade a spade and identify the enemy and its ideology. Don’t be afraid to use the ‘I’ word whether it be Islamist, Islamism, or Islam itself. But ignore the other ‘I’ word – the one the Islamists like to use to intimidate their opponents – Islamophobia.