Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Islamofascism

Fascism
"A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism. "

Well, I believe in God -- and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze – Verbal Kint

I’ve been listening to Hoguester talk about “Islamofascism.” Dubya has received criticism over it and Dan Lungren locked horns with good ole Charlie Rangel over the term. Rangel excused Lungren of broadbrushing all of Islam with that rubric. What rot and how typical of the Left. We really need to title our enemy with a proper name. Your basic American doesn’t really get the “Global War on Terror” or GWOT. Just what does that mean anyway? Who’s “terror” and what country are they from? As nomenclature, “GWOT” is downright incoherent. Superior Court judges don’t understand it that’s for sure. A message to Judge Diggs Taylor: The NSA is going to be mighty bored if they’re listening to my phone calls. With knuckleheads trying to bring 10 airliners down over the Atlantic, I really think they have something more important to listen to than my phone calls with my 80+ year old parents. If journalists are trading funny emails and phone calls with al-Queda lieutenants, I could really care less if they feel their journalist’s integrity is in danger. People don’t get “GWOT.” Fascism, however, is an understandable term just like communism. Add “Islamo-“ to that root and now we have an understandable enemy. I did some research on fascism and frankly was shocked at what I found. “Islamicists” or “Jihadists” and fascists have known each other for a long time. The connection is quite unsettling. Facing down evil is never at the top of anyone’s favorite list. Perhaps that’s why there’s a perceptible lack of backbone in our so-called political leaders these days. But who is our enemy? Its fascism and has been fascism for a long time.

You have to go back to the roots of fascism to understand our enemy today. In Latin, “fascio” means bundle or group usually reserved for political groups, surprise, surprise. Benito Mussolini’s movement (began in 1919) used an emblem of a bundle of rods around an axe head (fasces) symbolizing the power of ancient Roman magistrates. There’s the word defined – in a word; power. The movement itself is defined at the top of this post. Other political opportunists saw that Benito was on to something and adopted his political theory to their own. Hitler and his Nazis top the list naturally, but there were several others who recognized the personal benefit of Mussolini’s peculiar institution. One of those movements was the Ustase in Croatia during WWII. As I peeled away at the links involving the Ustase, the heart of darkness that is Islamofascism began to reveal itself.

The Ustase were installed as the government of the Independent State of Croatia by the Axis in 1941. They were the worse example of Roman Catholicism that comes to mind. They adopted Nazi social theory and spent the war years doing their best to wipe out Serbs, Gypsies, and Jews (of course), basically, anybody who wasn’t Roman Catholic. The death toll was in the hundreds of thousands depending on whose body count you read. They made one very interesting exception in their pogrom, however. Bosnian Muslims were considered Croats, but Muslim Croats. More interesting is some of the Muslim Croats were members of the 13th SS Mountain Division Handschar of the Waffen-SS administered by Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler. It gets better (or worse). Enter one Mohammad Amin al-Husayni or the Mufti of Jerusalem, an unrepentant anti-Semite.

This fellow made contact with Hitler’s government as early as 1933 looking forward to spreading their ideology in Palestine. The Nazi’s finally accepted the offer in 1938 after their initial fear of alienating the British had ebbed and started supplying al-Husayni with financial and military assistance. In 1941, al-Husayni issued a fatwa for holy way against the British in the Middle East. In gratitude for his assistance to the cause, Adolf Hitler himself received al-Husayni in Berlin as a head-of-state.

In 1943, al-Husayni really went to work for the Nazi’s and their Ustase proxies by recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the 13th SS Mountain Division, or Handschar Division. The Handschar spent the war in operations against Balkan partisans. While they did not engage in active extermination against Jews, al-Husayni was not shy to try his hand in that dark craft even though he was rather clumsy about it. The extermination mindset had reached those corners of his brain, the rest of us try to keep wrestled to the ground. In 1944, he organized a mission to Tel Aviv to poison up to a quarter million inhabitants (Jewish) by poisoning the water system. The saboteurs were caught in a cave near Jericho before they could carry out their mission. After the war, al-Husayni denied any knowledge of the Holocaust, but was accused by a Nazi war criminal (Adolf Eichmann's deputy Dieter Wisliceny) of being “one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan.” Whether one should believe a Nazi is another story, but that al-Husayni had no love for Jews was readily apparent.
From exile in Egypt, al-Husayni did his part to engineer the 1948 war with Israel not long after the British created the nation. He agitated against Israel until his death in 1974 in Beirut. He wanted to be buried in Jerusalem. Israel replied with a flat no. This man was described by another murdering Islamofascist as “our hero” – none other than Yasir Arafat. The mere fact that this man, this Islamo leader, associated with the Nazis, who would have exterminated him once they were done with him is quite troubling. Fascism and the worse extremists in Islam are kindred souls it appears. The depth of that evil scares me. Keyser Soze and Islamofascists would see eye to eye. Why is that? What’s with this murderous hatred of us and Jews in particular? That’s the next post.

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