I'm glad that the President has finally stopped calling this a War on Terror, and is now identifying the enemy. Unfortunately, I have to agree with Keith Burgess-Jackson that "Islamofascism" is the wrong term:

Why would President Bush use “fascist” to describe such an ideology? I honestly don’t know. The only thing I can think of is that “fascist,” like “communist,” has negative emotive meaning. It’s an all-purpose term of abuse. To call something fascist is primarily to condemn it—that’s President Bush’s goal—and only secondarily to describe it. (This is why Brian Leiter and other leftists call President Bush a fascist. It’s pure abuse, with little or no cognitive content.) The best term to describe the people President Bush has in mind is “Islamists.” A Muslim is an adherent of Islam, which is a religion. Islamism is not a religion; it is a political morality (note the “ism”) and a set of doctrines about permissible means of social change. (Terrorism is one such means.) Those who subscribe to it are Islamists. All Islamists are Muslims, but not all Muslims are Islamists. Islamism competes not with Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Confucianism but with liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, anarchism, and socialism. See here for more on this important distinction.

But it is obviously another form of totalitarianism, just as we fought in the last two world wars.

At least Bush has finally identified the other side in the war. It is no longer a war on a tactic, but is now a war on an identifiable group. When it was a "war on terror", it was obvious that groups such as the Tamil Tigers, the IRA, and Canadian Mohawk Warriors were not the target. Bush's speech merely confirmed who the enemy really is.

After all, the first step in solving a problem (after admitting that a problem exists) is correctly identifying the problem.

Burgess-Jackson makes some valid points. But he is wrong to say that fascism (in its original and historical sense) is equal to corporatism. Corporatism is a brader term, and there have been corporatist movements and governments that were not fascist - - Ireland under De Valera, for example. The Irish Senate is still constituted on a "corporatist" basis, with members nominated from the various functional divisions of national life.

Fascism was corporatism mixed with several other defining characteristics. One was a glorification of violence for its own sake, following the leftist revolutionary Sorel and the Futurist intellectual movement. Another was an anti-rationalism, glorifying emotions and impulse. A third element was a contempt for individualism and a glorification of the immersion of the individual into the collective, up to and including self-annihilation in the cause.

The Ba'athist movements of Iraq and Syria were and are pan-Arab fascist movements in pretty much the classic sense. Shi'a radical Islamism is a poliical movement having many of the characteristiccs of fascism, but fundamentally based on a religious justification. Reactionary Catholic movements with many of the same fascist characteristics, but based on a version of Christian theology, were prominent parts of the Franco and Salazar coalition governments in Spain and Portugal, which have generally been described as fascists (although pure ideological fascists were quite small parts of each coalition.) Such reastionary Catholic movements are generally described as "clerico-fascists"; "Islamo-fascist" would seem to be an equally valid parallel construction. Only a small minority with ideological axes to grind tries to conflate clerico-fascism with Catholicism in general; it's not clear why the term "Islamo-fascist" would be any more insulting to Muslims in general than "clerico-fascist" would be to Catholics.

Islamists are an identifiable group in the sense that they can be distinguised from Christians, Jews, Budhists, etc., but I don't see any bright line separating Islamists from your garden variety Muslim. Both point to the same body of theology and claim allegiance to it.

There is a difference in degree between one who will strap on a bomb belt and walk into a movie theater and one who will break into a Jewish organization's office and shoot people, but only of degree. There is a difference of degree between the bomber and the shooter and those who only provide technical support while remaining non-violent themselves, but only of degree. And there is only a difference of degree between those who actively help the jihadists and those who simply wouldn't be unhappy if the jihadists achieved their stated goals. The people who danced and high-fived and gave out sweets on the morning of 9/11/2001 were one in spirit with Mohammed Atta.

All Communists are Socialists, but not all Socialists are Communists, true. Yet Socialism seems to inevitably slide into totalitarianism sooner or later, as we're seeing with the European Union. Not all Muslims are jihadists, but I see nothing fundamental separating the one from the other but an ephemeral tolerance.

Islam alone is not a good predictor of whether a person is likely to become a juhadist. Islam conbined with a lack of assimilation into the shared civic assumptions of a free society is a much better predictor. We have no control over whether a person chooses to become or remain a Muslim, unless we get back into states picking and choosing what religions people can or can't belong to. We do have control over whether we can demand civic (not just superficial cultural) assimilation -- we used to demand it and now we don't. That seems like the place to work on, here and in Britain, Australia, and Canada -- all of which used to believe in their national cultures and today are sunken into multiculturalism.

While we're on the topic to words, one of my neighbors (an Air Force fighter pilot who has spent a lot of time in the Sandbox and who has experienced terrorism up close and personal) warns against use of the term "jihidi" when we're talking about terrorists. Calling them jihidis is an extreme complement in their view because they see themselves as holy warriors against the rest of the world.

I was thinking about this yesterday and came up with two alternatives, neither of which I'm entirely happy with, but I think they both have some validity:

Shariaist or Caliphist (although I also like the ironic term "Caliphnik")

Since the problem is not with their ability to be Islamic, but with their desire to apply Sharia law and/or establish a Global Caliphate, why not highlight those aspects of their ideology?

How about SOB's?

Where Keith Burgess-Jackson falls down is failing to distinguish between what a term supposedly means in the narrow rationalism of academic politics, and what it really means where the rubber hits the road.

Take his argument that "muslims are not statists", for example:

"Islamists aren’t trying to create a state in which all the parts work as one; their ultimate goal is a stateless world in which everyone worships Allah."

That sounds a lot like Marx and his "the State will wither away" idea, doesn't it? For Marxism, the goal was "a classless society", one where the State would wither away.

Now consider how Keith defines the Islamic ideology:

"To Muslims, including that subset of Muslims I call Islamists (see below), a state is at best a temporary thing, performing certain administrative, organizational, or ideological tasks."

"...their ultimate goal is a stateless world in which everyone worships Allah. Read up on Islam if this seems strange to you."

I suggest that Keith go read up on Marx -- and I don't mean just Das Kapital, but its real world results.

The problem for Keither and other rationalists of his ilk, is that when applied in reality, all ideologies end up along a one-dimensional continuum, defined by a single variable. No, it isn't left or right wing (an equally meaningless item, oh God don't get me started on that one); that variable is individual rights, a.k.a. freedom.

Why is this? Simple: because individuals have free will. They may reach different conclusions from you. Any ideology, therefore, which has any kind of plan for the form of society ("must believe in Allah", "must not be part of any 'class'"), regardless of what that form is, must necessarily use physical force against those who do not fit that form -- i.e. dissenters -- to achieve that goal. If the individual is subordinate, he must be subordinated by force, and that force must be wielded by something... that something is ultimately the State, by definition. The State therefore must and will have "intrinsic moral significance" to such ideologies, whether it's in the original documents or is added later -- as determined by the internal logic of those ideas.

Once in place, original intentions, goals and such (like "statelessness") mean exactly nothing, except as the particular rationalizations of that State, its slogans and formalities. It does not matter to what the individual is subordinated (God, "class", race, society, "humanity"); only that he is subordinated.

If you DON'T subordinate the individual, you have a society free of that coercion. This is why we call such societies "free". The form of such a society could be anything, but its essential characteristic is that it's organic -- not forced by a State. This was first called "the society of natural liberty", which the Marxists later dubbed "capitalism".

Once an ideology hits the ground, where it ends up is predicted and understood far more clearly by reference to this single variable of freedom, then by anything Keith discusses. The greater the freedom for individuals, the less statist the society.

In light of this, it really doesn't matter whether the catch-all term for these ideologies is "statism", the negative "anti-capitalism", or perhaps "collectivism". What is clear is that the Islamic ideology is just another instance of it.

To an advocate of freedom, such quibbles are of little import in identifying or fighting tyranny; the victims of all such unfree societies show the same degree and kind of "dead" across the board.