Summary
Discursive term through which post-9/11 U.S. neoconservatism sutured Islam to authoritarianism, whose genealogy Feldman traces in the Epilogue of A Shadow over Palestine through the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war and Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV (2007) (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 1229-1245).
Details
- Feldman presents Islamo-fascism as “a newly articulated expression of race war, one whose genealogy was shaped by durable symbolic and material links between Israel, Palestine, and U.S. imperial culture” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 1235).
- President George W. Bush framed Israel’s six-week 2006 barrage of Lebanon at an August press conference: “This is the beginning of a long struggle against an ideology that is real and profound. It’s Islamo-fascism,” and the same day, “This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 1231).
- Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism (2007) took its title phrase from Bernard Lewis by way of James Woolsey and Eliot Cohen, and was republished as a free supplement to the Wall Street Journal; Podhoretz argued Cold War vigilance applied to Islamofascism, citing George Kennan’s 1947 “Sources of Soviet Conduct” at length: “Substitute ‘Islamofascism’ for ‘Russian-American relations,’ and every other word of this magnificent statement applies to us as a nation today” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 1241).
- Podhoretz dates the war’s beginning before 9/11: “even while World War III was still going on, World War IV had already begun,” and 9/11 “actually represented the culmination of a long series of attacks” (p.25) (A Shadow over Palestine, line 1243).
- Feldman links the term’s legitimacy to the material circulation of Israeli security expertise into the U.S. War on Terror: border walls contracted to Israeli security corporations, NYPD surveillance of Muslim and Arab American students and mosques, and legal rationales for indefinite detention, targeted assassination and torture (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 1245-1247).
Related pages
A Shadow over Palestine, Norman Podhoretz, Neoconservatism, Permanent war, American Studies Association, Orientalism