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The term is thus meant to suggest a skewed Islam, an Islam "adapted to our age" by psychopathic men, whose own Islamic learning is purposefully politicized, and aggressively de-spiritualized. Since the alternative would be to say that Ahmadinejad, Zawahiri, et al. do speak legitimately for Islam, I don't see why anyone should object to the term "Islamofascist".

The problem is the solidarity within Islam that forces those who might not wish to strap on explosives and blow their neighbors up to offer at least the support of silence to the homicidal maniacs who claim to speak in the name of their religion. Silence is acquiescence, and in the absence of open rejection from the main bodies of Islamic clerics these men from Ahmadinejad to Zawahiri really do speak for Islam.

The failure here is twofold - first, from suicidal Western cultural critics who, in a pretense of fairness, consistently marginalize their own culture, and second, from Moslems who take the attitude that crazy as the lunatics may be they're still Moslems and hence are to be supported in the face of the Unbeliever.

That approach to solidarity itself has more in keeping with fascist and communist doctrine than it does with history. (Warring Moslem cities in Spain routinely used Christian mercenaries and allies, and vice versa, for example.) In Marxian doctrine this is dealt with as class solidarity, and one of the attractions of the Islamist movement to Marxist theorists is its similarity to international class struggle and the identification of the Moslems as an oppressed class. That is a gigantic blind spot and the explanation, I suggest, for the support on the part of the left for a doctrine whose victory would break the left utterly. That is the reason the left supports these fanatics - they hate the rest of us more.