Islamic Fascism

President Bush and others have begun using the term, "Islamic Fascism," to describe the terrorist enemy the United States and the rest of the civilized world is up against. This terminology has sparked controversy.

On Thursday's edition of CNBC's "Kudlow & Company," we had a rather heated debate on this very subject, between my friend Jed Babbin, author/former deputy undersecretary of defense and Ibrahim Hooper, the spokesman from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Incidentally, the good folks over at National Review Online assembled a symposium of experts to address this developing word choice brouhaha, and it is definitely worth a read.

Here's a snippet from Bat Yeor, the author of a number of books exploring the conditions of Jews and Christians in the context of the jihad ideology and the sharia law:

"...However, unlike Fascism, Islamism is deeply imbedded in a jihadic ideology, with its legal framework of permanent war derived from religious scriptures, consolidated by a history of 13 centuries of warfare, conquests, and subjugation of infidels. Unlike fascism, all its references are religious, and its hatred targets equally Jews and non-Jews. Codified in 8th-century Islamic jurisprudence, Islamist warfare tactics conform exactly to a sharia-jihadic worldview, set in an enduring, theological pattern. Similarities with fascism emerge from a shared totalitarian mechanism, despite divergences in the two movements. Promoters of jihadism define their actions as a jihad, using its terminology and history. But they object to Westerners adopting this view negatively since for Muslims jihad represents the highest sacred duty in the path of Allah, and it is this positive interpretation of jihad that they want to impose on its victims. Being unfamiliar with jihad, Westerners do not understand that the fight against terror is against a 21th-century jihad and they do not realize the breadth of its scope and constituents."