Janet Daley, writing in the Telegraph, explains why the word 'Fascistic" is exactly right in the context of explaining the actions of Islamists. Not Muslims, Islamists.
The anti-war-on-terror lobby has had a bad week. Not that it hasn't kept its end up. Oh no. Faced with a threat so devastating that it seemed more like a world-domination plot from a Superman comic than a hard-headed act of war, there was nothing for it but to fall back on semantics.
George W. Bush was pilloried for referring to "Islamic fascists" by, among others, the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu. Using that kind of language "on the ranch in Texas" did not help, he said, to make society "a good, neighbourly place".
I don't know what the ranch in Texas has to do with anything, but Dr Sentamu seems not to understand the difference between describing Islamic fundamentalists as fascistic, and saying that all Muslims are fascists.
Similar confusion seemed to prevail in much of the broadcast media. I heard one television interviewer ask a Muslim spokesperson if he thought that Mr Bush's "name-calling" had any point.
Name-calling? This makes it sound as if he had said: "Al-Qa'eda are a bunch of big fat poops."
The word "fascism" means an extreme totalitarian system that suppresses human rights and democratic freedoms.
Islamic fundamentalism is fascistic in the precise, technical sense of the word.
The war-on-reality brigade took aim at Tony Blair's "arc of extremism" phrase, too: it was simplistic and misleading to claim that all Muslim terrorists, from the Chechens to Iraqi Sunnis and Kashmiris, were somehow linked in one wicked confederacy.
And yet many of those same sceptical sophisticates who wished to distinguish so carefully between the various Islamic discontents would also claim that the answer to all our problems was to solve the Palestinian problem (and thus withdraw our support for Israel), which is certainly of little relevance to the anger of Kashmiri separatists with whom most British Muslim suspects identify.
The hairsplitting and blatant misrepresentation of what Bush and Blair have said, is a common propaganda tool. The language is quite precise and is not a sweeping generalization. The reaction to it as if the words were a sweeping statement is misdirection. They did not mean all Muslims and the people screaming about it know they did not. But they repeat the big lie and the press prints it.
Read the whole article. If you look at the comments as well, you'll see how deep the rot has gone.
You are certainly right that Blair and Bush did not mean all Muslims are fascists. But using the term to mean an “extreme totalitarian system that suppresses human rights and democratic freedom” is so broad as to rob it of any real meaning. Communist governments would (generally) be fascist by that definition. And don’t say Communist goverments are really fascists. There’s more than one variety of totalitarian, and the differences are important. If everybody you dislike is a fascist, you’re just doing propaganda, not genuine debate.
BTW, would the government of Iran qualify as fascist by the definition you quote? It allows its people a degree of genuine “democractic freedom.” They can vote in elections with several real candidates, and the outcome is not preordained. It is impossible to imagine a real fascist government, a Hitler or a Mussolini, allowing an election to determine who will be president.