It is somewhat surprising that Dr. Ray, a gentleman who is concerned with the intellectual provenence of Nazism, would uncritically perpetuate an intellectually lazy and meaningless term as "Islamofascism" and its variants.
As George Orwell said in Politics and the English language:
When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable."
The term "Islamofascism" obscures the fact that Mohammedan terrorism stems from Mohammadanism - its history, its scriptures and its laws, and has nothing to do with a secularist, nationalist movement of the early twentieth century however authoritarian and unpleasant it was.
For a more detailed and reasoned explanation for not using this inaccurate term may I recommend Daniel Larison at Eunomia:
"First, Islamofascist. I cannot stress strongly enough how stupid this word is, as are its close cousins Islamic fascist or the latest absurdity, Islamo-Nazi. I understand what people think they mean when they say it, and to a large extent I share the same opposition and revulsion to the reality to which this term obscurely refers, but I am obliged to recognise that it is a meaningless term. It takes the enemy of the moment, Islam, and in an attempt (not terribly convincing) to tell us that the war does not have a religious dimension or to say that we have beaten these sorts of people before or to claim that they are just like the people we have fought before we attach to it the handy label of fascist. Never mind that most people couldn’t give a serious, working definition of fascism that would be even remotely accurate, or that there are no substantive similarities between Islam and fascism except for their ready justification, use and glorification of violence and their shared commitment to a life lived as struggle.
Islam is submission to an almost entirely transcendent deity; fascism is a doctrine that claims that you can create your own transcendence through labour, struggle and action. One is theocentric, whatever you may think of their god, while the other is anthropocentric. Islam is a religion that makes no sharp distinction between the political and the spiritual realms; fascism is a political religion that elevates materialistic politics to the level of the sacred. Islamic civilisation, while severely burdened by the constraints of its religion, has still managed to create poetry, architecture and largely geometric art of some real skill and accomplishment; fascism has historically always been tied to kitsch and modernism and the ugliness associated with them. They are, it is true, both appeals to the masses, but appeals based in entirely different things: one the complete subjugation of everything to the will of Allah, the other the exaltation of a nation or nation-state to the point of earthly godhood. Both are pernicious and hostile to the creative synthesis of Christian civilisation and are historically most hostile to Christianity as a creed and way of life, but they remain distinct and very separate phenomena that we could not more press together into one term than we could could talk about ”conservatocommunism.”
If we object to Muslims fighting and believing as they have fought and believed for centuries, that is what we should say. Recognising Islam as the central problem of the Islamic world would also lower our expectations about the kinds of “solutions” or “cures” that can be administered, because you cannot cure another people’s religion. There has always been a vague awareness about this in the nations of the West, but because the role of Islam has been deliberately kept obscure (for various and sundry ideological and allegedly pragmatic reasons) our awareness of the limits of what can be done has also been diminished.
Furthermore, recognising Islam as the central problem of the Islamic world does not therefore oblige us to play the game the jihadis would like us to play, namely to engage them in fruitless conflict after fruitless conflict. Neither does it oblige us to justify perpetual war for perpetual peace, nor to endorse policies that we know, by our own standards, to be unjust or wrongheaded. But, if for Christians the blood of martyrs if the seed of the Church, we should understand that it is advantageous for the jihadis and Islam if we willingly provide them with more martyrs to their cause."
Other excellent posts by Daniel Larison on the same topic of "Islamofascism" can be found at: Islamofascism may not be true but at least its dramatic; You must be a fascist to object to using a word like fascism ; Not Islamofascism II,III,IV,V,VI.
The problem with the term "Islamofascism" is not simply pedantry. It perpetuates a false dichotomy between good Mohammedans (moderate Muslims) and bad Mohammedans (Islamofascists).
The only essential difference between Mohammadans is between those who wish to destroy the West immediately through violence and intimidation; and those who hope to destroy the West gradually from within through immigation, higher birthrates, and support for terrorism.
The futile attempts to create Western-style democracies out of tribal and Mohammedan peoples are wasteful of Western lives and resources; and do nothing to address the problem of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia financing and supplying Mujahadeen in the world, or the problem of hostile Mohammadan populations within the West.
The enemy of the West is Mohammadanism and Mohammadans - not "Islamofascism".
[Update: Several hours after writing the above - I discovered that someone else had made similar statements, far more clearly than myself:
Laurence Auster on Diana West's latest editorial:
West doesn’t merely complain about others who don’t know or who misrepresent our enemy’s identity. She has answers:
The “who” are Muslim jihadists; the “what” is Muslim jihad. There is violent jihad (terrorism), and there is “quiet jihad,” the peaceful consequence of the demographic shift of Muslims into the West. Both, however, result in Islamization—the spread of Islamic law. This is a dire threat to what could have once upon a time been summed up by the word “us.”
That is damned good, and it leaves the Hansons, the Bushes, the Lowrys, with their “fascism,” their “extremism,” their “it doesn’t matterism,” looking like shuffling dolts unable to think their way out of a paper bag.]
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