Michael Ledeen, checking in from sub-Saharan Africa, documents violence and oppression having very little to do with Islam. Africans "are dying," he says, "at the hands of marauders, of tyrants who starve them to death and then beg the West to provide money and food to the regimes who caused the artificial famines in the first place." Democracies are best familiar with the threat known as "Islamic-fascism" and "Islamo-fascism," yet while those labels are OK for the purposes of making concept manifest, there is, as I wrote last year, some risk that the prefix will be accepted as the semantic root.
Westerners have a tendency to not view dictators and terrorists simply as adherents to compulsory rule, but to order them by brand, that is, whatever particular doctrine is claimed to inspire assaults on humanity; and then assign brands degrees, first of danger and soon enough of tolerability. Operational priority is a good excuse, democracies obliged to face adversaries as practicable. Construing parties with "bad" and "bad-bad," though, leads to strange and harmful equivocation. Trying to secure a meaningful difference in sociological consequences of, say, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union — maybe respectively hyphenated as "Teutonic-fascism" and "collectivist-fascism"? — is like choosing between defenestration and arsenicism.
Three misinterpretations are residual, being a) an "Islamic" enemy perceived as the only threat to liberal society, or b) a range of enemies that defies category, or c) a host of countries and parties not even recognized as deadly and fascistic. Most Americans are not as insensible as Congressman John Dingell, who recently withheld absolute support of Israel so he wouldn't short Hezbollah, but some polls do show a certain public temptation to regard Hezbollah — whose token irredentist license is six years revoked — as one would a league of concerned citizens.
And there is trouble with the labels themselves. How Islamic, strictly speaking, is the conduct of terrorists when referenced Koranic excerpts are removed from context — if the holy book that guides most Muslims through irenic lives is referenced at all? Disambiguating assorted enemies as authoritarians, period, is prerequisite to defending against and destroying them.