THEY ARE FASCISTS

 Artículo de  Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed en “Asharq Al- Awsat” del 14-8-06

 Por su interés y relevancia he seleccionado el artículo que sigue para incluirlo en este sitio web.

La referencia de este artículo y otros de igual relevancia la he obtenido del blog del “NUEVO DIGITAL”. (L. B.-B.)

Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed  is the general manager of Al -Arabiya television. Mr. Al Rashed is also the former editor-in-chief of Asharq Al- Awsat, and the leading Arabic weekly magazine, Al Majalla. He is also a senior Columnist in the daily newspapers of Al Madina and Al Bilad. He is a US post-graduate degree in mass communications. He has been a guest on many TV current affairs programs. He is currently based in Dubai.

Con un breve comentario al final:

UNA SUBESPECIE DEL TOTALITARISMO  (L. B.-B., 17-8-06, 11:30)

Many of us are only concerned with reputation and image, our image in the media, and the reputation of the Muslims in the world, but they do not care about reforming the original source, their children.

When US President George W. Bush described those who plotted to kill thousands of passengers in ten airliners as Muslim fascists, protests from a number of Islamic societies in the west and the east were voiced against this description.

What is wrong with using a bad adjective to describe a terrorist as long as he is willing to personally call himself an Islamist; declares his stance, schemes, and aims; while his supporters publicly call for killing of those whom they consider infidels, or disagree with them religiously or politically.

The strange thing is that the protesting groups, which held a press conference, would better have held it to denounce the deeds of those affiliated to Islam, who harmed all Muslims and Islam.

Bush did not say that the Muslims were fascists; he said that the Muslim fascists were the problem, i.e. he distinguished between an extremist group and the general innocent peaceful Muslims. Yes, fascism is a word that has bad connotations, and is used here to approximate the meaning to the listeners. The westerners know that fascism is an extremist nationalist movement, which emerged from the European society, and was responsible for destructive wars caused by its premises, which are based on discrimination, racism and hatred. This approximation is correct when you apply it to the literature of the Islamic extremists. The same as the Europeans fought fascism and the fascists by word and by gunpowder, the world will fight the extremist Islamists. This is what the good Muslims, who are at the forefront of those hunting down Al-Qaeda, do; the same as the Muslim who exposed the latest conspiracy to hijack the airliners, when he hastened to inform the security authorities when he suspected what was happening in the neighborhood.

This is why I do not understand what those people - who want to protect reputation and image from the westerners - want to call the Muslim extremists who resort to violence? Do they want to call them Khawarij (The earliest Islamic sect, which traces its beginning to a religious-political controversy over the Caliphate)? The problem is that no one (in the west) understands its historical meaning. Do they call them by their names only, such as Osama, Ayman, Muhammad, and Zamani? Do they call them according to the sarcastic Egyptian way: "people who should remain nameless?"

Describing them as fascists in the west is better than all the bad adjectives that rightly or wrongly have been attributed to them. This is because as far as the westerners are concerned, fascism means a specifically defined group that still lives within their societies, is from their ethnic groups and religion, and hence distinguishes between them and the others.

What is more important than preoccupation with preserving the image is to rectify the situation, and to confront the extremists among us. The majority of the westerners did not know anything about Islam and Muslims until Bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri, Muhammad Ata, and the culprits of the London explosions called themselves Islamists, and started to use the Koran and the Islamic historical nomenclatures. You cannot call the Red Brigades Movement anything g other than what they call themselves, and there is no escape from calling them Italian communists; the same applies to the National Front in Britain, which is described as a Nazi and fascist movement.

At the end, describing rotten apples as rotten does not make the people hate eating good apples. The same applies to the Muslims; there are one billion Muslims in the world, and the world has no option other than dealing with them, and hunting down the evil minority among them. We have wasted a long time since the seventies in being preoccupied with protesting against nomenclatures and images. This is despite the fact that these people hijack civilian airliners, kill people in restaurants, and justify their actions by using pan-Arab or Islamic descriptions. To describe a Muslim as terrorist is natural if he is a terrorist, the same as you do with a Colombian drug smuggler, an Italian Mafioso, a Russian butcher, a British Nazi, or a US right-wing extremist.

Breve comentario final:

UNA SUBESPECIE DEL TOTALITARISMO  (L. B.-B., 17-8-06, 11:30)

Quizá sería más preciso decir que son totalitarios igual que fascistas y comunistas. La diferencia reside en que el fundamentalismo es teocrático, y por tanto invade muchos más ambitos de la conciencia. Pero al mismo tiempo, al basarse en una exacerbación de la religión tradicional y en las estructuras religiosas del islamismo, no necesita aplicar una represión interna "ex novo", apoyada en un partido totalitario de nueva creación e implantación. Le basta con los clérigos y las creencias establecidas, aunque radicalizadas: la sharia se impone a toda la sociedad desde el poder político, y la yihad como liberación espiritual individual se transforma en guerra externa al infiel, por ejemplo. Pero los tres totalitarismos constituyen religiones políticas, proyectos de creación de sociedades unánimes y expansivas en forma de Reich, "Revolución mundial", Imperio o Califato. Los infieles, razas inferiores y disidentes ya sabían --saben, sabemos--- lo que nos espera si no espabilamos. Significativamente, el fundamentalismo, al basarse en las estructuras tradicionales, no necesita aplicar un nivel de represión interna tan alto como el fascismo o comunismo, pero externamente su rasgo esencial es el sometimiento de las sociedades infieles por el terror y la guerra.