David Horowitz, the right-wing provocateur, along with Michelle Malkin and similar bottom-feeders, is promoting “Islamofascism Awareness Week” this month on college campuses, in conjunction with college conservative groups. It’s another exercise in putting a smugly self-righteous face on their own bigotry.

“Islamofascism” is a meme cooked up by right-wingers to make racism and anti-Muslim prejudice sound respectable. Supposedly, we are threatened by a world-wide movement of Muslim fanatics, and, further, their oppressive culture is one that must be opposed at any lengths in the name of freedom. This provides a convenient excuse for invading any Muslim country, for kidnapping, “disappearing”, torturing, and murdering Muslims without oversight, due process, or hope of release, and for vacating our own Constitutional rights and freedoms. It also provides a convenient outlet for bigoted animus - where once denigrating Muslims or advocating invading “pagan” countries at will smacked uncomfortably of racism, religious bigotry, and a Kiplingesque lack of modernity, today you can be out and proud in your hatred of brown-skinned non-Christians as a political stance favoring tolerance, freedom, and progressive values (of the kind harbored by David Horowitz, Michelle Malkin, and the Young America Foundation). Suddenly the people who fall over themselves whenever the word “fascism” is used in reference to the fascist tendencies of the American right (the heirs of the same people who declared the anti-Franco brigadiers in WWII to be “premature anti-fascists”) are finding fascism in religious beliefs that are not in fact very far removed from their own, but held by inconveniently dark-skinned people.

Now, in fact, I agree that traditional Islam is extremely oppressive, and offensive to any decent sensibilities. (I’m not sure the word “fascism”, evocative of a distinct type of political movement, quit applies. It seems to me the word “religion” is all that is needed here.) But you can’t not be suspicious of this sudden sensitivity to “Islamofascism”, especially given who it comes from. I can’t help feeling it isn’t the “fascism” part they’re worried about. And given their pants-wetting over-reaction to what is actually happening, I can’t feel much sympathy for their fears of what might happen.

Whatever the problems with Islamic culture may be, they certainly aren’t a significant threat to the US or its citizens. Terrorism is a terrible, unforgivable thing, but it’s hardly confined to Muslims, and by no means directed only at the first world by the third world. And its magnitude is vastly overstated by the terrified right wing. The likelihood of any given American being harmed by a terrorist attack, in terms of historical trends, is vastly smaller than the risk of many perfectly ordinary harmful events that we take for granted. Even taking 9/11 into account, terrorism is at the bottom of any list of significant harms to US citizens; other than 9/11, it’s essentially negligible in terms of absolute risk to life. That in no way condones it, but it ought to inform our response to it; instead, our response, both in terms of thoughtless vengeance and of needless self-restrictions, has been vastly disproportionate, and it is right wingers who have made it so. A large-scale and emotional response to 9/11 was understandable, but emphasis on terrorism as a particular danger, on Islami terrorism as essentially the only kind that exists, not to mention the destruction of two, and now possibly three, governments that were not responsible for the attack, clearly serves interests and antagonisms that have nothing to do with terrorism itself.

For one thing, even given the right wing’s seemingly absolute incapacity for critical self-reflection, you would think that people who really thought 9/11 was a serious threat to the country would try to avoid making it worse. But George Bush has already killed far more Americans than died on 9/11, not to mention scores, probably hundreds of times as many Muslims - virtually none of whom had anything to do with the attacks. If the “war on terror” mattered as anything but an excuse for invading oil-rich non-Christian countries, you’d think they’d be doing something about terrorism - but Bush has declared that bin Laden is not a priority, and that al Qaeda is not a target other than in the form of its Iraqi spinoff; non-Muslim terrorism is no priority whatsoever, but ordinary left-wing political groups with no history of terrorism are put on “watch lists”. If reducing the likelihood of terrorism mattered, you’d think they would notice how much an international pariah the US has become, they would avoid adopting terrorism and torture as tactics themselves, and they would take seriously the idea that terrorism is caused by something, rather than pretending that “certain people” are just “like that”. The reality is exactly the opposite in every case.

But the “war on terrorism” is not about terrorism, and the concern for “Islamofascism” is not about fascism. In particular, it’s anything but a criticism of repressive religious conservatism. That would require noticing that terrorist acts by Muslims within the US have been vanishingly few (though admittedly of spectacular proportion). It would require noticing that the second most-destructive terrorist act in US history (Oklahoma city) was the work of a home-grown Christian political extremist, in reaction to the government’s antagonism to a right-wing religious group (the Branch Davidians). It would require noticing that the number of terrorist acts by right-wing Christians in the US is literally in the thousands, and the number of deadly attacks by such groups far exceeds those by non-Christians (almost all of them aimed at abortion providers). It would require noticing that the oppressive social standards and misogyny they pretend to disapprove of on the part of conservative Muslims are almost identical to (though more harshly enforced than) those of conservative Christians. And it might require admitting that the Constitutional protections for individual liberty and personal autonomy that Westerners enjoy are an important part in keeping our own terrorists and oppressive reactionaries from dominating our countries the way religious extremists do in some Muslim countries.

None of that will be in evidence during “Islamofascism Week”. The word “Christofascism” will not be mentioned - certainly not by the many in attendance to whom it might best apply. Neither will “Zionist fascism” be mentioned, nor will the degree to which the torture, disappearances, and murders conducted by the Bush regime might also qualify as fascism.

So, while I agree that there is much to be criticized in reactionary Islam, it’s the reactionism I object to more than its religious component. I’m used to that part. And to the extent that “Islamofascism Awareness Week” serves to obscure awareness of the ways in which the oppressin its organizers pretend to disapprove is not, in fact, an uniquely Islamic pheonomenon - not, in fact, one its organizers need to look very far away from their own homes to discover - I don’t expect it to serve any purpose other than allowing its organizers to wallow in their own fears and prejudices, and feel glad about doing so.