Ease up on yelling ‘Nazi’

OPINION:

In the heat of America’s many debates, “Nazi” and “fascist” are among the epithets too often hurled. Last week, for example, Rush Limbaugh compared Adolf Hitler to President Obama, saying each “ruled by dictate” and claimed to represent “the will of his people.”

Mr. Limbaugh added that Hitler “was called the messiah. He said people spoke through him. Do you know the very first law that Hitler ordained? The very first law was about how to cook lobster. They were to be boiled. That was deemed to be the least painful way. … Now does this sound like what any conservative president has ever done, or does it sounds like what liberals are doing all over this country?”

The logical flaw here: Concern for the welfare of lobsters is not an unfailing indicator of Nazi sympathies.

Not long after Mr. Limbaugh said that, I received an e-mail from Glenn Greenwald, the left-wing polemicist who writes for Salon. He pointedly reminded me that I had criticized MoveOn.org (and others) when they compared President Bush to Hitler. Would I now be consistent and criticize Mr. Limbaugh on the same basis?

I replied: “Comparisons with Hitler should be made only very rarely and very carefully. It was wrong, outrageous and damaging for MoveOn.org to compare Bush to Hitler. It is wrong, outrageous and damaging for Rush Limbaugh to compare Obama to Hitler. We must, to coin a phrase, never forget: Hitler’s project was genocide. George Bush and Barack Obama are not genocidal. No elected American official of either major party is.”

Predictably, Mr. Greenwald published only the bit about Mr. Limbaugh, omitting the rest. But maybe something useful can come of this brouhaha: a chance to understand a little more about Nazism and other varieties of fascism, how they’ve threatened us in the past and the form that threat has taken in the present.

Michael Ledeen, now the Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, spent years studying fascism. He was perhaps the first to describe the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, as a “clerical fascist.” With that in mind, consider:

c Nazism was supremacist. Hitler preached that Germans and Aryans were a master race, born to rule the world. Militant Islamists — whether Shi’ite (like the Ayatollah Khomeini) or Sunni (like Osama bin Laden) — also are supremacist, though they substitute religion for race, the “Nation of Islam” for the German nation.

c The Nazis believed their triumph would come through a glorious war. The Islamists believe their triumph will come through a glorious holy war — a jihad against infidels and the West.

c The Nazis believed that only men, not women, are fit to lead and wield power. The Islamists concur.

c Committed Nazis must be willing, as Mr. Ledeen phrased it, “to risk all, and sacrifice all, for the cause.” Suicide bombers are only the most obvious expression of this belief among Islamists.

c Nazis despised both communism and capitalism, seeing themselves as a third way. The same is true of Islamists. Iran’s rulers promise that just as we now have a world without the Soviet Union, “a world without America is achievable.”

c German Nazis practiced genocide. Jews and other “inferior” groups were exterminated by the millions. Islamists vow to wipe Israel off the map.

Mr. Ledeen also observes: “Hitler had his Reich, Osama wants his Caliphate, and Khomeini foresaw a global Islamic state in which all believers would be brought together in an irresistible unity.”

Hitler, of course, fought a conventional rather than an asymmetrical war. But he quite specifically said that “terrorism is the best political weapon.” With uncanny prescience, he said: “Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.”

Nevertheless, President Bush only once referred to America’s Islamist enemies as fascists, and then he abandoned the term because, he was advised, it might insult moderate Muslims. (Why would it?) Mr. Obama prefers to talk of “violent extremists.” So we’re left refusing to call things by their right names but shouting “Nazi” at fellow Americans to score partisan points. Is this really the best we can do?

Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.