The Louisiana politician Huey Long declared in the 1930s that “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism” and “in the name of national security.” I don’t think we’re there yet, but there are some fascist-like forces mobilizing, and they’re doing so in the name of protecting American Judeo-Christian civilization from a phantom they’ve conjured up called “Islamofascism.” (Variants include Islamo-Fascism, Islamo-fascism, Islamic fascism, etc.)
They want to make it a household word, sliding easily off the tongue, interchangeable with the more familiar “Islam” or inadequately frightening “Islamism.” (The latter alludes to specifically political Islam, including variants of it that—like the political evangelical Christianity in this country—are non-violent.) They want the media to embrace it, and politicians beginning with president Bush to routinely incorporate it into their rhetoric. They want academics to promote the concept of a specifically Muslim form of that evil phenomenon that emerged in war-exhausted Europe in the 1920s-30s and which in its principle expressions (in Italy, Germany, Spain, Hungary) had some distinctly Christian features. They’re throwing millions of dollars into a propaganda effort to popularize a concept that isn’t just politically and intellectually tendentious but calculated to vilify more targets (indeed any Muslim target) for attack.
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