Asia Times Online :: Islamism Facsism Terrorism

Islamism, fascism and
terrorism

By Marc Erikson (Nov-Dec '02)

PART 1
Links between neo-Nazis and the radical ideology of Islamism have surfaced since the terrorism of September 11, 2001 - an event that was celebrated by both groups. But fascism and Islamism have an 80-year history of collaboration based on shared ideas, practices and perceived common enemies.

PART 2
Substitute religious for racial purity, and most ideological and organizational precepts of Nazism are essentially identical to the later precepts of the Muslim Brotherhood. Marc Erikson traces the Brotherhood's collaboration with fascism from the present-day brains behind al-Qaeda to the era of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during World War II.

PART 3
The West is waging war not against the religion of Islam, but against the little-understood political philosophy of Islamism, which, upon close examination, reveals itself as a distinct - and distinctly noxious - form of the same kind of fascism that went down in defeat in World War II, but which never quite died out, especially in the Middle East.

PART 4
The key personality behind the global Islamist jihad of the 1990s was not Osama bin Laden; rather, it was his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the man whose critical acumen and organizational and operational skills were central to the success of al-Qaeda. Now his fascist Islamism has seized the ideological initiative in the Muslim world of today.

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