The day the enemy became 'Islamic fascists'

Speaking to the voters
Santorum also faces a difficult re-election battle against Democrat Bob Casey in November.

Casey campaign spokesman Larry Smar countered that “Rick Santorum is more concerned about spin and word choice” than concrete steps such as implementing the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.

The advantage of using the phrase, Santorum’s media consultant John Brabender said, is that “it makes clear who the enemy is.”

“The senator has been very vocal that the definition of the war was terribly miscast as ‘the war on terror,’” Brabender said.

He said Santorum has been using the phrase for months, and finds it helpful as he travels the state in his bid for re-election to a third term.

“You see it at campaign stops, a number of people leave the event and understand it, they say ‘aha,” Brabender said.

Politically, he said, Santorum’s framing of the issue “creates less of a question of Democrats versus Republicans, or a referendum on the president. It comes across more as somebody explaining clearly what the priorities are.”

Creeping into the lexicon
Perhaps this is why the phrase is surfacing more frequently at the White House. About two weeks ago, White House spokesman Tony Snow used the term at a press briefing, suggesting that people are not understanding the threat.

Addressing a question about al-Qaida deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, Snow said: “…you've got to keep in mind it's not merely a war against an abstraction, it's a war against something very concrete, which are Islamo-fascists, Islamic fascists, whatever you want to brand them — people who have a totalitarian view of things which they claim to be representation of a religion, using that to destabilize sovereign states.”

On Aug. 7, just days before the foiled terror plot was revealed, Bush used the term in a press briefing with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about the conflict in Lebanon.

"This is the beginning of a long struggle against an ideology that is real and profound," the president said. "It's Islamo-fascism. It comes in different forms. They share the same tactics, which is to destroy people and things in order to create chaos in the hopes that their vision of the world becomes predominant in the Middle East."

Much-abused language
Stanford University linguist Goeffrey Nunberg argues that fascism is not really the right word to describe this global terror network.

“There’s no historical or philosophical connection between al-Qaida and fascism,” says Nunberg, an expert on the language of politics. “They’re creepy people, but that doesn’t mean they’re fascist.”

The word fascism is usually associated with a particularly oppressive government, almost always hostile to religious clerics, he says. In the United States, it is most commonly associated with Hitler’s bloody Nazi regime.

Nunberg says the term “fascist” has been broadly abused throughout the last few decades — by the Left and the Right to mean anyone, or even anything, oppressive and cruel. Although it has lost its definition, he says, it retains its emotional impact.

“Fascism is the epitome of evil,” he says. “If you want to say something is as evil as evil can be, then its fascism.”

Definitions aside, Nunberg says if the administration wants to stay the course in Iraq, and push difficult but unpopular security policies, its choice of words might be effective.

"Given that they have decided on this strategy, then the analogies to fascism seem rhetorically the smart thing to do in a certain sense," he says. "You want to evoke these 'just wars' of the past."

FREE VIDEO Chertoff on terror plot Aug. 10: “Hardball’s” Chris Matthews talks to Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff about terrorist plans to blow up nine planes flying from the U.K. to the U.S. Hardball

Asked about the expression Thursday on MSNBC's Hardball, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said: “It might may not be classic fascism as you had with Mussolini or Hitler. But it is a totalitarian, intolerant imperialism that has a vision that is totally at odds with Western society and our rules of law.”

For American Muslims, though, the language is uncomfortably provocative.

“We ought to take advantage of these incidents to make sure that we do not start a religious war against Islam and Muslims,” said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations advocacy group Thursday. “We urge him (Bush) and we urge other public officials to restrain themselves.”

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