{"id":13406,"date":"2007-10-29T16:45:41","date_gmt":"2007-10-29T20:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/13406.html"},"modified":"2007-10-29T16:45:41","modified_gmt":"2007-10-29T20:45:41","slug":"krugman-no-such-thing-as-islamofascism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/krugman-no-such-thing-as-islamofascism\/","title":{"rendered":"Krugman: No such thing as Islamofascism"},"content":{"rendered":"

I suspect David Horowitz will be very disappointed to hear it, but Paul Krugman explains<\/a> that Islamofascism isn’t a real phenomenon.<\/p>\n

[T]here isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t. And Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with 9\/11 — in fact, the Iranian regime was quite helpful to the United States when it went after Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Beyond that, the claim that Iran is on the path to global domination is beyond ludicrous. Yes, the Iranian regime is a nasty piece of work in many ways, and it would be a bad thing if that regime acquired nuclear weapons. But let’s have some perspective, please: we’re talking about a country with roughly the G.D.P. of Connecticut, and a government whose military budget is roughly the same as Sweden’s.<\/p>\n

Mr. Podhoretz, in short, is engaging in what my relatives call crazy talk. Yet he is being treated with respect by the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination. And Mr. Podhoretz’s rants are, if anything, saner than some of what we’ve been hearing from some of Mr. Giuliani’s rivals.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Krugman goes on to skewer Mitt Romney’s ad<\/a> about the threat of a “single jihadist Caliphate,” which doesn’t really make any sense, before turning his attention to Mike Huckabee’s recent assertion<\/a> that “Islamofascism” is the “greatest threat this country’s ever faced.”<\/p>\n

Responded Krugman, “Yep, a bunch of lightly armed terrorists and a fourth-rate military power — which aren’t even allies — pose a greater danger than Hitler’s panzers or the Soviet nuclear arsenal ever did. All of this would be funny if it weren’t so serious.”<\/p>\n

The point, of course, isn’t to argue that America doesn’t have dangerous enemies; we do. It’s just that the politics of fear can lead to a certain unhealthy hysteria, which leads to even more unhealthy policy proposals — such as attacking Iran.
\n<\/p>\n

In the wake of 9\/11, the Bush administration adopted fear-mongering as a political strategy. Instead of treating the attack as what it was — an atrocity committed by a fundamentally weak, though ruthless adversary — the administration portrayed America as a nation under threat from every direction.<\/p>\n

Most Americans have now regained their balance. But the Republican base, which lapped up the administration’s rhetoric about the axis of evil and the war on terror, remains infected by the fear the Bushies stirred up — perhaps because fear of terrorists maps so easily into the base’s older fears, including fear of dark-skinned people in general.<\/p>\n

And the base is looking for a candidate who shares this fear.<\/p>\n

Just to be clear, Al Qaeda is a real threat, and so is the Iranian nuclear program. But neither of these threats frightens me as much as fear itself — the unreasoning fear that has taken over one of America’s two great political parties.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I suspect David Horowitz will be very disappointed to hear it, but Paul Krugman explains that Islamofascism isn’t a real phenomenon. [T]here isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13406\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}