Chalk & Cheese

Neocon persiflage from Murdoch fishwrapper:

"I believe the US-led invasion of Iraq was a mistake, but once it was done it was a job that needed to be completed. History will show that invasion has most likely had the adverse effect of strengthening the arm of fundamentalist Islamo-fascists who seek to subjugate their people under a theocratic dictatorship. But unlike Iraq, the decision by John Howard to send troops into Afghanistan was not so much to maintain our alliance with the US but to defend the values of liberty, equality and justice that are fundamental to our way of life... Failure to defeat the totalitarian far right wing Islamo-fascists, who distort the Islamic faith to suit their extremist ideology, could set off a domino effect in the Middle East with the potential to unleash a new global force, hell-bent on subjugation under their ugly ideology." (Why we need to be there, Paul Howes, The Sunday Telegraph, 3/10/10)

Scholarly reflection from Cambridge University Press:

"Initially, it would seem, the radical Islamism of the twenty-first century belongs to an inclusive class of revolutionary movements that might best be identified, didactically, as antidemocratic - one of an indeterminate number of movements that include a wide variety of related forms - among which one might find a subclass of neofascisms. For the purpose of our analysis, however, Islam's jihadists-salafists hardly qualify for membership in the latter category. Today's Islamists are religious eccentrics, antinationalists of conviction, political reactionaries, indifferent to economic growth and industrial development, and committed to terrorism as their principal method of restoring the dignity and glory of their ummah. They simply do not satisfy the criteria that would make them credible neofascists. The twentieth century witnessed the emergence of religious movements that might conceivably be considered neofascist; Islamic fundamentalism, struggling to restore an Islam of yesteryear, happens not to be of their number." (The Search for Neofascism: The Use & Abuse of Social Science, A James Gregor, 2006, pp 195-196)