The Kurdish government has been repressing separatists because they’re trying to get the south of Turkey to violently secede and take Turkey’s southern oil reserves with them. These would be the same Kurdish separatists that currently launch attacks against civilian and government targets in Turkey from Iraq. So the Kurds are hardly innocent bystanders in all of this.

As for Turkey’s government, they’re authoritarian, but they’re not Islamist:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/turkey/story/0,12700,964020,00.html

“Lebanon has been in Civil War chaos for nearly 40 years”

So? Whether Lebanon is in a civil war or not is not relevant, their state is still not Islamist…it’s a parliamentary democractic republic (albeit one whose democratic practices have been interrupted by Syrian occupation, but their country is still not an Islamic republic run according to the Koran):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanon

And the point remains that “Islamo-fascism” or “Islamo-totalitarianism” (or whatever term you want to make up along those lines) is an invalid description because the overwhelming unified Islamic movement the term implies does not exist. The movement against the United States consists of al-Qaeda and a few small terrorist groups that are either loosely affiliated with al-Qaeda or merely inspired by them. Al-Qaeda, Iran and Saddam’s Iraq had nothing to do with each other because none of those groups were conspiring together to attack the United States. This term you’re so fond of throwing around is nothing more than bullshit propaganda used to justify expanding the war to permit Bush’s campaign of forced “democratization”. It’s a bumper sticker slogan and a lie, and you’ve fallen for it hook, line and sinker.

Of the four you named, Lebanon has been in Civil War chaos for nearly 40 years and, well try being an Orthodox Christian in Turkey…..you pretty much exist at the whim of the state and your leader is hand picked by a Muslim dominated government. Not to mention the fact that the Turkish government actively supresses opposition political parties and Kurdish separatists.

It’s even beyond the reach of the specialists. This is the lesson that empires have learned over and over and over again when they meddle in the Middle East. Islamic society is so fractured and filled with so many hatreds and rivalries and grudges dating so far back that the only people who can possibly sort it out are the locals themselves. And they’re not even close.

That’s why non-interventionism is the best policy we could follow in the Middle East…when we get involved we give them a common external focus for their hatred and create unity where none exists. When we leave them alone, they generally go back to killing each other. As long as we stay involved over there the Middle East will never sort out its very real and serious problems and they’ll never stop hating us. If we leave the resentment won’t go away overnight, but it will start dissipating over time and at the very least we won’t be adding fuel to the fire.

Agreed…terminology matters, especially when you get into the snakepit that is Middle Eastern politics.

Although I think that the primary reason we’re involved in a war over there is not so much a failure to understand and define, but because of our naive willingness to address every issue that ever pops up in the Middle East regardless of whether we’re capable of doing so competently and whether it concerns us or not. The conflicts and grudges over there go so far back and are so intertwined that even if we use the right terminology we’re still nowhere close to determining the motivations that make the various sides tick. All the more reason to just stay out of it unless it directly concerns us.

There is definitely an important conflict here and we definitely need to be able to address it carefully. Using sloppy terminology does not help the discussion.

That word’s just as useless and inaccurate. There are actually countries in the Middle East where Islamic totalitarianism is not the default government setting (Lebanon, Turkey, pre-Soviet Afghanistan, and post-Taliban Afghanistan to name three).

Hitchens hates religion and attempts to discredit it at every opportunity and he rabidly supports a neo-conservative foreign policy (check out his archives over on Slate sometime). The term “Islamo-fascist” was designed to serve both of his agendas and draw direct comparisons between Islam and the Nazis (an almost universal negative hot button), not to further understanding of the conflict or to provide objective analysis.

I’ll adopt Kip’s idea and refer to it for what it is — Islamototalitarianism.

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I don’t hate all Muslims, I just hate people who want to kill others and consider Western Civilization an enemy.
Comment by Doug Mataconis — October 15, 2007 @ 7:00 am ”

Which includes a lot of people who aren’t Muslims. Some, like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber, are Westerners themselves as I pointed out in a previous post.

I also pointed out that we cannot awaken the victims of “Islamofascist” propaganda by validating the use of the term. It appears to me that you, Doug, are one such victim.

Ron Paul is absolutely right. “Islamofascism” is a propaganda term intended to perpetuate a need for constant warfare. It is right out of 1984. When are you going to wake up to this fact?

You have no reason to conclude that, and indeed you provide no evidence to prove it. Instead, you ASSUME it’s true because he rejected the word. For you, rejection of a hate-filled word equals rejection of the idea that there is a legitimate threat from hateful people.

You also wrote, “Not everyone who believes that Islamic radicalism is a threat to human freedom wants to invade Iran tomorrow, so maybe it’s time to stop claiming that they do.” But once again, Ron Paul didn’t claim that. Of the word islamofasicist he claimed, “It’s war propaganda designed to generate fear so that the war has to be spread.” That’s true. He was talking about the word and people who constantly push for its use. He was NOT talking about everyone who thinks that terrorism by pseudo-Muslims is a threat.

I, for one, do not minimize the threat from terrorists who falsely claim to be good Muslims, but I don’t for a minute think that there’s any good to be derived from the repeated use of the word Islamofascism.

Successful politics includes the successful use of words. I think Paul is making a very wise political decision not to use a very negative word that could easily backfire on his campaign. You should get over the fact that he rejects the word without turning a blind eye to the threat.

By the way, regarding the word islamofascism itself, I suggest you actually get an English translation of the Quran and read some of it sometime. I have a copy, and while I have no intention of ever becoming a Muslim, I’d have to honestly say that the #1 book of their religion is a lot less hate-filled and a lot more peace-loving than most of the Old Testament is. There is no doubt in my mind that terrorists who call themselves Muslims are as far from mainstream Muslims as it is possible to be.

Having said that, I am greatly concerned that the continued use and spread of the word “islamofascism” and its corresponding hatred and distrust of all that is Muslim could help drive good, peaceful Muslims into the arms of Osama bin Laden and his ilk over time.

“All that we have to do is to send two Mujahideen to the furthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies. This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the Mujahideen, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.”