@medium-density,
My "vexatious attitude" has been struck only in your imagination. Don't overrate the importance of posting online.
It is immaterial to me who has coined the term "islamofascist," the term is not being used appropriately. There are several characteristics of fascism which simply don't apply to Muslim estremists. This may seem like a minor point, but it's not. I'll get to the differences between fascists and Muslim extremists in a moment. If you were to decide that your neighbor hates you because you are white, when, in fact, your neighbor is constantly irritated because he finds your car parked in his parking space, then you won't take the step necessary to ameliorate the situation--i.e., parking somewhere else. If you have a conflict to deal with, you have to be able to understand those with whom you are in conflict before you can effectively deal with the situation. Calling Muslim extremists fascists not only doesn't help to understand them, it obscures what really motivates them.
There are several important aspects of fascism which are absent from the outlook of Muslim extremists. Nationalism is an inherent characteristic of fascism which is lacking in Muslim extremists. So, for example, the Muslim extremists (i will use the term Islamist, as we've already canvassed that term) in North Africa--in southwest Libya, southern Algeria and northern Mali--don't recognize lines drawn on a map by dead white guys 150 or 200 years ago. The international boundaries which modern nation states recognize have no meaning for them. The Islamists in Mali use both weapons and ammunition, and even some fighters left over from the war in Libya. Libya being currently an effectively failed state makes this easy for them. There is strong Islamist sentiment in Algeria, where a fundamentalist Muslim movement had won a national election, but were overthrown by a military coup several years ago. It can reasonably be said that the army in Algeria controls the cities and the larger towns, but that the countryside belongs to the Islamists. That explains why this newly observed war (it was going on long before the press took notice recently) has spilled over into Algeria.
Nationalism therefore, a central trait of fascism, is meaningless to Islamists. Another central trait of fascism is command economies, which--despite the phony claims of fascists about their socialist goal of creating a dictatorship of the proletariat--are constructed in consultation with and to the benefit of industrialists and financiers within the fascist nation state. Islamists simply have no conception of either economics or politics. For the Islamist, those are just tools to achieve their ultimate goal, which is some sort of caliphate (which i will discuss in a moment). In the example of Iran, their principle industry, petroleum production, and all of the satellite industries which can be created as a product of the foreign exchange the petroleum generates are partly or wholly owned by the state, in the persons of the mullahs. I'm sure they have some religious justification for this, but the effect is to enrich the religious leadership without necessarily developing the Persian economy to its fullest potential. Any development of their economy will have been a product of the desire of the Mullahs to further enrich themselves. That's not to say that such a selfish motive is not effective. The Persians are relatively affluent, which is the more impressive given their isolation in the international community. Petroleum is such a valuable commodity that it would be nearly impossible to harm Iran economically.
In Afghanistan, their one source of foreign exchange was heroin. The Taliban were immediately effective in crushing the heroin trade in parts (but certainly not all) of Afghanistan. Ironically, the people of Afghanistan originally approved of the Taliban precisely because they effectively took on the drug lords. However, economics formed no part of the Taliban agenda, and they did nothing to repair the damage that 40 years of war and civil war had done to the domestic economy, and did nothing to develop what little had survived. Islamists have no economic agenda, which is a very striking departure from fascism.
Militarism is also a signal trait of fascism. While we tend to think of Islamists in terms of the armed strife they engender, there really is no militarist aspect to fundamentalist Islam. In the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqis relied on World War One type, defense in depth field fortifications ("trenches"), and the Persians riposted with human wave attacks. The Iraqis were very effective at dealing with breakthroughs--they had armored divisions in reserve at intervals beind their lines, and maneuvered quickly and effectively to staunch breakthroughs. Their political paranoia and their own stupidity about military institutions made them an easy target for the highly efficient western coalition sent against them in 1990-91, but they were more than necessarily effective against the Persians, and the human wave attacks achieved nothing of military value, while slaughtering young, conscripted Persians in their thousands.
The Taliban became the dominant (but not the exclusive power) in Afghanistan because they seized the armored vehicles left after the collapse of Afghanistan's communist government, especially the self-propelled artillery. That was sufficient for them to seize and hold Kabul (which is actually outside the Pashtun tribal areas of southern Afghanistan and Waziristan from whence the Taliban arose). It was not enough, however, for them to effectively deal with the drug lords in the northwest, who largely just ignored them, or the so-called Northern Alliance, a coalition of largely ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and even some disaffected Pashtuns. The Taliban received military aid from Al Quaeda and the ISI (Pakistan's security apparatus). Al Qaeda is as worthless for fighting a protracted, modern war as any other Islamist organization, but the ISI are damned good, and their support could be said to have prevented the military collapse of the Taliban. The Northern alliance received support from Iran, Russia, Tajikistan and India. That was sufficient to keep that shaky organization alive, but not for them to overwhelm the Taliban government in Kabul.
For Islamists, war is reduced to a set of simple and simple-minded techniques. They launch rockets willy-nilly in the general direction of their enemies, they set up IEDs or send in suicide bombers and they take hostages, whom they often cannot resist slaughtering. There really is no effective militarism among the Islamists which makes them very far indeed from fascists. If you want to see a truly fascist state in the middle east, and an effective one, look at Syria before the uprising, and even since that time. Assad's army is made up of Sunnis, Shi'ites, tribal minorities and Arab secularists--people who would be enemies under an Islamist regime. Their morale remains high, and they are professional soldiers with a lot of experience and good equipment. They effectively use their personnel and equipment not just in battle but in the control of key areas which they wish to hold, unless the rebels can come at them in sufficient numbers to overwhelm them, in which case the fall back. A fighting retreat is one of the most difficult military maneuvers, and Assad's army has shown time and again that they're good at it. It is precisely because Assad is a species of successful fascist rather than an Islamist that he has survived.
All of which leads one to ask what it is that the Islamists are really up to. Basically, they want to re-establish the Caliphate. Some actually say as much, others use different terms, but their goal is the establishment of Islam as a universal religion, and sharia as the universal legal code. The Taliban called their state the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The Persians call their government the Islamic Republic of Iran. The name Islamic republic is used in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well. The key is the establishment of religion, and it will inevitably be an intolerant state. In European history, the same thing can be seen--the annual slaughter of the "pagan" Saxons by the Franks, the Albigensian crusade, the wars of the Reformation--religious enthusiasm is by its very nature intolerant, and inevitably it is murderously so.
Unfortunately for your goal, i'm not into impressions or prejudices. The only operative prejudice here is religious. Eventually, as was the case in Europe, the will to power and the lust for wealth will probably subsume the religious fanaticism of the Islamists, just as one can see it having happened in Iran. Iran would, more honestly, be called the Islamic Corporation, rather than the Islamic Republic. But that will be a very long time in coming. The fervor of the Islamists is a young enthusiasm, reborn after centuries of desuetude, and it relies on young men and women, too. Both because of European exploitation and the exploitation of their ruling classes, the people of Muslim nations are largely impoverished--when you have nothing, you have nothing to lose. A sharp contrast can be seen between most Muslim nations and Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation. There, they have something, they have economic prosperity. Although there are Islamists in Indonesia, they don't have nearly the hold on the population that one sees in the poorer Muslim nations, because the indonesians have something to lose, and are unwilling to risk it.
Finally, i don't see a racist component. Certainly there are some cretins in the West who are motivated by racism, but their numbers are not significant. If you are Muslim, other Muslims don't care about your race. If you are not, then you are either infidel or apostate in the eyes of the Islamists, and being of the same "race" as them won't save you.
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