By Arabs:

Arabism flies in the face of historical fact. Ethnic minorities in Lebanon, as throughout the Middle East, have suffered at the hands of Arabs since the Arab-Islamic invasions in the early Muslim period. Of the efforts of Arab regimes and their ideological supporters in the West to de-legitimize regional identities other than Arab, Walid Phares, a well-known professor of Middle East studies, has written: "[The] denial of identity of millions of indigenous non-Arab nations can be equated to an organized ethnic cleansing on a politico-cultural level." This tradition of culturally suppressing minorities is the wellspring of the linguistic imperialism regnant at Middlebury's Arabic Summer School.

Yet healthier models for language instruction are easy to find. In the Anglophone world, Americans, Irish, Scots, New Zealanders, Australians, Nigerians, Kenyans, and others are native English-speakers, but not English. Can anyone imagine an English language class in which students are assumed to be Anglican cricket fans who sing "Rule Britannia," post maps showing Her Majesty's empire at its pre-war height, and prefer shepherd's pie and mushy peas? Yet according to the hyper-nationalists who run Middlebury's Arabic language programs, all speakers of Arabic are Arabs--case closed.

A leading Arabic language program shouldn't imbue language instruction with political philosophy. It should instead concentrate on teaching a difficult language well--on promoting linguistic ability, not ideological conformity. Academics should never intellectualize their politics and then peddle them to students under the guise of scholarship. Those who do may force a temporary dhimmitude on their student subjects, but in the end they only marginalize their field and themselves.

This is, in some ways, even more egregious than that loon up at Wisconsin who wanted to teach 9/11 conspiracy theories in a class on Islam, because it's actually much more insidious.

[Via Jonah Goldberg, who also writes today about the Swastika and the Scimitar]

President Bush undoubtedly didn’t have any of this in mind when he dubbed our enemies in the war on terror “Islamic fascists.” But his comments — analytically flawed as they may be — added some much-needed moral clarity to our current struggle. They also helped to illuminate a much-overlooked point: Islamic fundamentalism and Nazism are historically and intellectually linked. (When the Israelis caught Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Final Solution, a leading Saudi Arabian newspaper read: “Arrest of Eichmann, who had the honor of killing 6 million Jews.”) Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bush’s remarks seem to have struck a nerve.

Americans, Irish, Scots, New Zealanders, Australians, Nigerians, Kenyans

What, no Canadians!?

Arabism flies in the face of historical fact.

Arabism is not about historic fact, it is about future intentions. Unity for the Arabs has long been a dream of some.

I believe a sensible strategy for the West with respect to Muslims is "divide and conquer" which requires that we work to create divisions between Muslims (see Federalist #10 for the basic idea) and that requires that we NOT treat all Muslims the same.

Be brutal with the worst of the Islamic nut-jobs and be generous with any who show signs of moderation. Better that than fighting all of them at once.

I still don't understand what is wrong with saying Islamic fascists, excepting the word zealot or fundamentalist or radical, being included in the phrase. The people in question, are without question followers of Islam. There is no doubt of that, so if I follow what I know about their religious convictions, they are Islamic people.

Then this from Merriam-Websters dictionary:

fas·cism
Pronunciation: 'fa-"shi-z&m also 'fa-"si-
Function: noun
Etymology: Italian fascismo, from fascio bundle, fasces, group, from Latin fascis bundle & fasces fasces

1 often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

2 : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control

They Islamic people in question adhere to a radical form of their religion, that advances theories or beliefs in vast dictatorial powers for their Islamic religious leaders. They avow severe economic and social regimentation, and when in control excercise forcible suppression of opposition.

Followers of fascism are FASCISTS, followers of this brach of fundementalist, Whahabist, radical Islam are still considered ISLAMIC, so the term ISLAMIC FASCISTS is dead on correct.