Julian Sanchez has no reason to fear being struck down by the gods: Bo Burnham's new "New Math" is funnier than Tom Lehrer's old "New Math"; if you think that's blasphemy, you don't know what makes either of them funny in the first place. Here's Burnham:

One quibble: "What's domain, domain, range?" Burnham asks. "A kid with too much in his pants." That's because the domain of a function is usually represented by x and the range by y. Hence "domain, domain, range" becomes «x,x,y» becomes XXY, or Klinefelter's Syndrome. But most Klinefelter's cases aren't true hermaphrodites; they're men with smaller than usual equipment. Which means that such kids usually have too little in their pants (at least if you buy into traditional gender norms).

Still, Burnham's new math is powerful stuff. It defines the unnatural log ("duraflame"), extends over complex numbers ("Santa Claus ⋅i" is an imaginary times an imaginary, so it's real), and allows the construction of a factor tree of the factors that caused his girl to leave him ("a tree full of Asian porn"). It's no insult to Lehrer to say he didn't cover that much ground. In fact, it's a tribute to Lehrer that his stuff is still so fresh forty years on with the odd update here and there. Just look at what can be done with his "National Brotherhood Week":

Oh the Feminists hate Republicans
And Republicans hate the Feminists
To mock all Feminazis
Is an old G.O.P. rule

But during Islamo-Fascism Week
Islamo-Fascism Week
You’ll see Ann Coulter On Our Backs at USC
She’s helping Muslims seek
Their Feminine Mystique
Simone De Beauvoir’s really very cool

So true. If Burnham really wants to threaten Lehrer's position, he'll have to come up with a Ratzinger-remix of "Vatican Rag." And don't try to tell me that a new arrangement of "Wehrner von Braun" for present circumstances isn't long overdue:

Maybe something like: "Don't call them torture fetishists./ Say rather they're lifelong fraternity pledges./ 'Stick foreign objects into prisoners/ And information comes out./ Who cares if it's nonsense?'/ Says Rumsfeld the lout.'"

On the other hand, nobody will ever improve on Lehrer's cheer for his alma mater:

Fight fiercely Harvard, fight, fight, fight!

Demonstrate to them our skill.

Albeit they possess the might,

Nonetheless we have the will.

Although that's not a huge exaggeration of Harvard's actual fight songs. To which the only response is, "Break through that Crimson line/ Their strength to defy." Pwns them every time.

At Reason's blog Hit & Run, Brian Doherty calls my attention to a sharp piece by CATO foreign policy analyst Justin Logan in the pages of The American Prospect on the inanity of analogies between present circumstances and Hitler and the Munich agreement that have saturated political discourse ever since, well, the original Hitler ended up in a ditch, covered in petrol, on fire.

Like Brian, I was struck, and perhaps a more fitting term would be awestruck, by one of the items Justin presents in his brief:

[Norman] Podhoretz penned a meandering essay in Harper's in 1977 titled "The Culture of Appeasement" which likened antiwar sentiment in post-Vietnam America to the wariness of war in Britain after World War I, and then linked the latter to a homosexual yearning for relations with all the young men who perished in the Great War. In Podhoretz's view, "the best people looked to other men for sex and romance," and as a result, didn't much like them being killed by the score on the Continent. "Anyone familiar with homosexual apologetics today will recognize these attitudes."

Indeed. Future scholars of the Norman Podhoretz oeuvre will undoubtedly hail N-Pod's sounding of the klaxon against the rising tide of homosexual-inspired pacifism (or is it pacifist-inspired homosexuality?) as a fitting complement to "My Negro Problem and Ours," which, reversing the relative quotients of offensiveness and perspicacity of the Harper's piece, surprisingly restricts the former to its title. (But I digress.)

It seems almost beside the point to mention that connections between martial traditions, attitudes, and experiences and (male) homoeroticism have a venerable literary and historical pedigree even encompassing some of the most beloved figures in American history. The flip side of this phenomenon is the observable connection between foreign policy belligerence and xenophobia, on one hand, and gender anxiety on the other. To be sure, I do not mean to imply that a desire to start wars whenever and wherever possible is an expression of latent same-sex desire, but rather, that waging war can be an ideal avenue for validating one's masculinity, provided due diligence is maintained against any queering-up of the proceedings. (Julian Sanchez has some related thoughts here.)

The aforementioned piece about the Negro Problem --- you know, N-Pod's and yours and mine --- is salutary at the very least for tying together the scattered threads of Podhoretz's career. If we take him at his word about the psychic scars that black bullies left on the pre-adolescent Podling, his turns from socialist exponent of workers' rights, to liberal Zionist, to neocon alarmist, to addled paranoiac projecting the demons in his mind onto the geopolitical map, all begin to coalesce as variations on a campaign for revenge against his childhood tormentors. (Incidentally, I do try to refrain from psychoanalyzing where possible, but anyone who could write the lines I quoted deserves to be the subject of a conference.)

In any case, Mark Steyn owes N-Pod royalties for originating a theoretical framework connecting gayness with Islamofascism.

[Note: This post is Stephen Schwartz's take on an ongoing Jewcy debate between Jamie Kirchick and Ali Eteraz about the legitimacy of the term "Islamofascism." Read Kirchick's original post; Eteraz's reply to it; Kirchick's second post; Eteraz's reply to it.]

I claim to have originated the term “Islamofascist” as a description of present-day jihadists. “Islamofascism” was previously used, most notably, by the British scholar Malise Ruthven to denote Arab dictatorships, i.e. in a completely different context. Writing from Washington in The Spectator (London), a week after the atrocities of September 11, 2001, I intended to compare Al-Qaida with the threat of the Axis to the democracies during the 1930s, and the need to unite against the terrorists. I presumed that a common front would bring leftists and liberals together with conservatives, as it did in America in 1941, but leftists and liberals did not figure prominently in my thinking. The concept was not specifically aimed at leftists and liberals, and thus my own discourse about Islamofascism did not comprise an appeal to the left.

Rather, my formulation had emerged from my discussions with Muslims in America, in the Balkans, and by e-mail around the world, about Saudi-financed Wahhabism. These Muslims referred to the Wahhabis as “fascists in religious disguise.” Any consideration of leftists and liberals in discussing Wahhabis as Islamofascists was a secondary, if not a purely unconscious aspect of my thought process. The Muslims I then knew disliked leftist politics, and I was mainly concerned with Muslims.

In writing my book The Two Faces of Islam, however, I tried to develop the theory of Islamofascism in political and sociological terms. Last year, at TCSDaily.com, as reposted at the Weekly Standard website, I published a text titled “What is Islamofascism?” There I argued, “Political typologies should make distinctions, rather than confusing them, and Islamofascism is neither a loose nor an improvised concept. It should be employed sparingly and precisely. [Radical Islamist] movements should be treated as Islamofascist, first, because of their congruence with the defining characteristics of classic fascism, especially in its most historically-significant form – German National Socialism.”

Further on, I wrote, “Islamofascism [like Nazism] pursues its aims through the willful, arbitrary, and gratuitous disruption of global society, either by terrorist conspiracies or by violation of peace between states. Al-Qaida has recourse to the former weapon; Hezbollah, in assaulting northern Israel, used the latter. These are not acts of protest, but calculated strategies for political advantage through undiluted violence…

“Fascism rested, from the economic perspective, on resentful middle classes, frustrated in their aspirations and anxious about loss of their position. The Italian middle class was insecure in its social status; the German middle class was completely devastated by the defeat of the country in the First World War. Both became irrational with rage at their economic difficulties; this passionate and uncontrolled fury was channeled and exploited by the acolytes of Mussolini and Hitler. Al-Qaida is based in sections of the Saudi, Pakistani, and Egyptian middle classes fearful, in the Saudi case, of losing their unstable hold on prosperity – in Pakistan and Egypt, they are angry at the many obstacles, in state and society, to their ambitions. The constituency of Hezbollah is similar: the growing Lebanese Shia middle class, which believes itself to be the victim of discrimination.

“Fascism was imperialistic; it demanded expansion of the German and Italian spheres of influence. Islamofascism has similar ambitions; the Wahhabis and their Pakistani and Egyptian counterparts seek control over all Sunni Muslims in the world, while Hezbollah projects itself as an ally of Syria and Iran in establishing regional dominance.

“Fascism was totalitarian; i.e. it fostered a totalistic world view – a distinct social reality that separated its followers from normal society. Islamofascism parallels fascism by imposing a strict division between Muslims and alleged unbelievers. For Sunni radicals, the practice of takfir – declaring all Muslims who do not adhere to the doctrines of the Wahhabis, Pakistani Jama’atis, and the Muslim Brotherhood to be outside the Islamic global community or ummah – is one expression of Islamofascism. For Hezbollah, the posture of total rejectionism in Lebanese politics – opposing all politicians who might favor any political negotiation with Israel – serves the same purpose. Takfir, or ‘excommunication’ of ordinary Muslims, as well as Hezbollah’s Shia radicalism, are also important as indispensable, unifying psychological tools for the strengthening of such movements.

“Fascism was paramilitary; indeed, the Italian and German military elites were reluctant to accept the fascist parties’ ideological monopoly. Al-Qaida and Hezbollah are both paramilitary.

“I do not believe these characteristics are intrinsic to any element of the faith of Islam.”

I would add to this two supplemental notes. First, my method in analyzing Islamofascism was not original – it is derived from Trotsky’s writings on the menace of Nazism. But the influence of Trotsky as a historical and political thinker is not dependent on allegiance to socialism, much less Bolshevism.

Second, in response to a query from Christopher Hitchens, I would add that Wahhabism shares with German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese imperialism a theory of racial superiority – as every Muslim knows, Wahhabis believe that only Arabs are real Muslims, only Saudis are real Arabs, and only Najdis – from the desert region in which Wahhabism appeared – are real Saudis.

I emphasize that none of my commentary on this topic was or is directed to the left or aimed at influencing the left. The discussion of Islamofascism has, in effect, been hijacked by leftists, such that many who take up the matter now assume that given my Trotskyist background, and interest in Trotsky as a historical personality, the theory of Islamofascism was conceived as a political gambit to summon left-liberal support to the war on terror.

I was and remain indifferent to the views of leftists and liberals about Islamofascism because I have completely given up on the left and liberals in general as agents of positive change. I broke with the left openly in 1984 over Nicaragua, and their support for the Soviet-imperialist Sandinistas. Between then and now a series of other lessons in disaffection was reinforced for me by the American left. I was prominent in the Newspaper Guild, as I had previously been active in transportation unions, but watched as a labor organization dedicated to improved income, conditions, and job security was transformed into an ideological agency fixated on concentration of media ownership and other “progressive” issues. Politics has always been the death of effective trade-unionism, and there is no substantial labor movement in America today. In the absence of strong unions, there is no real left. Nor, of course, is there a basis for strong unions in the situation of industry, which has declined as an effect of the information revolution and rise of the world market. The unions have failed to grasp the challenge of organizing information workers or acting on a global level; rather, they have turned to the narcotic of protectionism. But none of these lacunae can be filled by the blandishments of leftist ideology, especially that sheltered in the Western academy.

My final loss of respect for the left and liberals came during the Yugoslav wars. I went to Bosnia-Hercegovina beginning in 1991, working (and living) there and in Kosovo during various periods from 1997 to 2001, and returning there repeatedly since 2003. I witnessed American and other foreign leftists siding with the Milosevic regime in its program of fascist aggression, and then observed the “politically-correct” policies imposed on the prostrated Balkan Muslim territories by the United Nations as well as representatives of the Clinton administration. UN and European Union administration, with American support, kept the murderous Serb terrorists in control of two-thirds of Bosnia and still deny independence to Kosovo, which is currently threatened by revived Serb violence. How can one consider “progressive” those who cannot tell the Bosnian and Albanian victims from the Serb aggressors? I also experienced the absurd process by which American liberals and social-democrats associated themselves with the bogus anti-Milosevic “revolution” in Serbia in 2000. I published a short meditation on that misadventure titled “Nausea,” but paraphrasing Camus rather than Sartre.

I could expatiate on this turn in modern political history, but that should wait for another time. I remain a defender of the oppressed, but I no longer believe at all in liberal clichés. The war in Iraq has reinforced my indifference to, and insistence on the irrelevance of, leftist and liberal rhetoric. As if these life-changing events were insufficient, I have lived to see a widespread propaganda emerge condemning democracy, in a vocabulary indistinguishable from that employed by the fascists of the 1920s and 1930s. Such nonsense has entered the American mainstream, along with unambiguous Jew-baiting directed against the neoconservatives, and both have been adopted with enthusiasm by the former left and liberals. Today’s true partisans of democracy are found more among the neoconservatives and traditional conservatives than among leftists and liberals.

It is therefore of little or no consequence to me whether leftists and liberals understand the threat of Islamofascism. More than ever, I am almost exclusively concerned with Muslim comprehension of the term, which has been badly misrepresented by Islamist demagogues.

Those who claim that “Islamofascism” is “offensive to Muslim Americans” are complicit in such deceptions. First, the category of “Muslim American” has been confected to transform a religious community, which should be referred to as “American Muslims,” comparable to “American Jews” or “American Christians,” into a presumptive ethnic community aggrieved about discrimination, like “African Americans.” (“Jewish Americans” is acceptable as a reference to those who define Jewishness ethnically, but American Muslims are not ethnically uniform, and nobody would refer to “Catholic-Americans” as if they were members a single culture. “Christian American,” in the past, was a euphemism employed by Jew-baiters and is a precedent Muslims should avoid.)

The only American Muslims offended by the term “Islamofascism” are those to whom it is best applied, i.e. the “Wahhabi lobby” centered on the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). On October 22, the first day of the Islamofascism Awareness Week organized by David Horowitz, 1,000 American Muslims assembled at the Saudi Embassy in Washington to protest “Wahhabi fascism.” They were obviously not offended by the identification of extremist Muslims as fascist. Nor, in the time immediately following 9/11, did one of America’s most strident and extreme Islamist preachers, Hamza Yusuf Hanson, anxious to reinvent himself as a moderate, refrain from telling the Guardian in London, “there are Muslim fascists.”

Perhaps predictably, I agree with Jamie Kirchick’s view that liberals and leftists are conditioned to denounce the term “Islamofascism,” rather than to analyze the Islamofascist phenomenon, out of a misplaced solidarity with Muslims. But I find Ali Eteraz’s response to Kirchick to be fantasy and nothing more. The claim that American academic institutions shelter those “leading the charge against theocracy, anti-semitism, fundamentalism, and disenfranchisement in the Muslim world” is exaggerated, to say the least. The few individuals he enumerates, laudable as they may be, are a tiny minority when compared with the army of apologists for radical Islam found in Middle East Studies departments on American campuses.
Further, I am not convinced that Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi, Iranian dissidents Akbar Ganji and Haleh Esfandiari, Riffat Hassan, Amina Wadud (whose activities are ambiguous and distorted by Western media), Andullahi an-Naim, Rafia Zakaria, Laleh Bakhtiar, or Ziba Mir-Hosseini can all be accurately described as acolytes of the charlatan Edward Said. The diatribe titled Orientalism is not only incomprehensible but amazingly ignorant of Islam – Said even attacked Sufism. Frantz Fanon, whose work had nothing to do with Islam except that he was a guest of the Algerian revolutionaries, is forgotten. And what is the “post-colonial left” but another trivial invention of American academics? I have no reason to believe that any, much less all, of the mentioned figures reject the term “Islamofascism.”

But perhaps they do reject it. If so, so what? I and others, who in the anti-Wahhabi combat may be counted in the millions, do not reject it. Islamic pluralism means that we who love freedom may disagree with one another about theory, typology, and tactics, if we do not disagree in condemning the fascism represented by Saudi Wahhabism, Egyptian and Pakistani-Afghan radicalism, and the Iranian clique of Ahmedinejad. Although I have criticized some allies, and reserve the right to argue with others, we should not consider it more important to dispute with our associates in the battle against the extremists than to defeat the terrorists. But only a few leftists and liberals have so far proven their commitment to such a victory over Islamist violence.

Few hate Stalinism more than I, but I would never criticize Churchill and Roosevelt for their wartime alliance with the Muscovite monster. Various enemies of Islamofascism may anger us by their criticisms of what they perceive in Islam. But the Islamofascists want to kill us. While we keep our mouths wide open, yelling our disagreements with those also under terrorist attack, a sword is being sharpened for our necks. Let me add that one of the speakers at the aforementioned October 22 Muslim rally against Wahhabi fascism, the Saudi dissident Ali Al-Ahmed, lives in the U.S., but has been threatened with beheading on a Saudi website.

I believe Islamofascism will be defeated by Saudi Sufis, Shias and other non-Wahhabi Muslims, who are pressing King Abdullah to break the official links between the Wahhabi clerics and the monarchy; anti-Wahhabis in other Gulf states; Iranian reformist intellectuals and Sufis; Iraqi Shia opponents of the Khomeinist state system in Iran, and Iraqi Sunni enemies of Al-Qaida; Algerians and Egyptians who survived Islamist terror; Balkan Sufis and traditional Hanafi Muslims confronting Wahhabi infiltrators; Turkish Alevis opposed to the Sunnicentric AK party regime; Sufis and traditionalists in West Africa, Sudan, Kurdistan, Central Asia, and southeast Asia, and the brave opponents of Wahhabis, other takfiris, and the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And Western help is crucial in this war, as in earlier wars against tyranny.

But few of these Muslim heroes have heard, or care about, Edward Said or his peers. Few people in the West, including self-important Muslim bloggers, know or care about them. Many are ordinary peasants, village clerics, and local shaykhs. Some are Shias well-versed in Western as well as Islamic philosophy. But they know what Islamofascism is because they have faced it, and their opinion counts most. The left and liberals long ago ceased to advocate for such people, and instead placed all their confidence in the Western academic elite, i.e in themselves and those who aspire to become like them. Academic leftists, yearning for the ‘60s, are as repellent as old rock stars; they are to politics what Mick Jagger is to pop music – pathetically believing they are immortal. I am sorry, but I do not eat that bread.

I don't accept Jamie Kirchik's argument that in order for the left to deal with its naïve post-colonialists and their blind eye towards terrorists and fanatics we have to use the epithet “Islamofascism.” It was because this is such an unreasonable conflation of two separate issues that I didn't even bother to address the part about Islamofascism in my first reply and moved straight to the real issue: what do we, in the left, do about those who are naïve?

Fact is, there is no logical or even pragmatic relationship between using the term Islamofascism and the left cleaning its house. If you want to deal with the Massads and Spivaks, engage them, and pull at them by offering them a better narrative, not by slapping them with a term that is already politicized, already obfuscatory, already a part of the right-wing lexicon, and already divisive. I made one attempt at such an engagement with Chomsky when I wrote him an open letter. I didn’t need to shove a meaningless term down his throat.

Perhaps Jamie considers these members of the left to be of such little value that he wishes they would simply go away. I think that is a very incorrect thing for the left to engage in. I studied continental philosophy in college, read Fanon and Said by the ton, and wrote my thesis (on Nietzsche) under post-structuralist philosophers. Under Jamie's view I should be laughing with glee when militants kill Americans or fanatical patriarchs engage in honor killing or stoning. Yet that is hardly the case. I turned out to have quite a healthy antagonism and moral clarity towards Islamic militancy and fanaticism, not despite the influence of post-colonial thinkers, but because of them. They helped me see that the nature of oppression – all oppression – is not just overt, but subtle, sinister, and sometimes seductive. Their assistance in helping uncover the labyrinthine structures (and strictures) of historical patriarchy, both in the West and East, allowed me to deconstruct Islamist misogyny. It wasn’t my conservative professors who taught me that when Islamists talk about “family values” they are using it as a code word for keeping women subjugated. Quite the contrary, it was the allegedly naïve post-modernists like Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault, who exposed the history of physical and sexual discipline on the basis of authoritarian religions (by showing to me how it occurred in the Christian West).

Those on the left who want to so casually give into Dadaist terms like Islamofascism do it not out of intellectual defensibility of the term but out of convenience. If the issue is that post-colonial and post-modernist theories are producing students and activists who do represent a form of self-hate, then what we have to do is re-orient these theories, not dismiss the flock that follows them as unworthy of our time. Remember, post-modernism was not supposed to be a rejection of Enlightenment; it was a continuation of it (see, for example, Foucault’s Was ist Aufklarung or 1970's Lyotard).

That reorientation is not difficult, though it does help having the facility to offer something more than just the rote narratives – “all naïve leftists are enablers of Islamofascism!” It also requires speaking to those with whom we disagree with a modicum of respect. Jamie is willing to allot time and respect to someone who promotes such beacons of freedom as Ann Coulter and Rick Santorum (what are their views on homosexuals again?) but has no time for the other, far more valuable, project? Clearly his theoretical and verbal skills are superior to most of the rest of us, or else he would not be so accomplished at such a young age. However, in this instance his skills are misdirected.

My co-blogger Ali Eteraz has published a thoughtful critique to my post in defense of the word "Islamofascism" to describe the Islamic fascist enemy. But he does not provide much in the way of argument to oppose the use of this admittedly provocative (but entirely correct) word, other than fault my defense as "unsatisfactory."

Rather, Eteraz lists a plethora of academics and academically-affiliated individuals who stand four-square against Islamism as a way of challenging my secondary charge that large segments of the left are insufficiently concerned with the threat it poses to our way of life. I too, however, could just as easily make a list of feckless, terrorism-apologists at American universities, beginning with the execrable Joseph Massad, a prominent disciple of Edward Said, who is very much considered (or, at least, considers himself) a man of the left and was defended as such several years ago when Columbia's Middle Eastern Studies department made national headlines for its anti-Israel faculty. "Why honor him by pretending that he's 'the left?'" Eteraz asks. I agree, but he should be asking that question to the post-colonial theorists who very much populate the academic left and fawn over him and his truly sinister work, blurbed his book, and the prestigious University of Chicago Press which published it.

The problem with this whole debate, of course, is one over nomenclature, what Eteraz characterizes as my having "little focus on keeping the terms 'the left' and 'liberals' straight." I plead guilty to over-generalizing, and perhaps from now on we should differentiate between the Hitchens's and Massad's by employing Michael Walzer's language of the "decent" (and its corollary, the "indecent") left. But for every Haleh Esfandiari he throws down on the table, I'll match him with a Joseph Massad and raise him a Hamid Dabashi (and I've got the entire Columbia University MEALAC department in my hand). To respond to my argument about the troubling state of the anti-totalitarian left with a list of a handful of anti-totalitarian leftists does not negate the existence of the problem.

It goes without saying that David Horowitz is a blunt object, but he nonetheless has an important message about Islamic fascism, as much as liberal smart-asses like Max Blumenthal and Josh Marshall would like to ridicule it. One of Andrew Sullivan's readers put it well:

There are many people on college campuses as prestigious as Harvard and Yale, that genuinely hope that the Islamofascists in Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world prevail, just to poke a finger in America's and the West's eye.

Perhaps like so many leftist[s] do, they don't think past their intentions and their feelings to what outcomes would actually take place if say, Iraq became a nation state ran by the equivalent of a Taliban. They of course would claim that they are violently against "fascism," but wouldn't dare apply that term to a non-white, non-Western group.

There is a sickness as vile and nihilistic as the Islamofascists themselves. Whether or not they consciously support the beheaders and bus bombers, they for all practical purposes do support the Islamofascist enemy. I don't think Horowitz's comment is out of line in the least.

This element exists on the left, and it's bigger and more influential than Eteraz would care to admit. It's up to him and other decent men of the left to ensure that it does not grow.

Read Kirchick's Original Post and Eteraz's Reply to it.

Putting aside the debate over whether Islamofascism is historically appropriate (Hitchens says it is) or pragmatically sound (Gen. Abizaid says its not), I found Jamie Kirchick's thesis that liberals are not adequately opposed to violence and oppression in the Muslim majority world, to be quite unsatisfactory.

My primary complaint is that in his post there seems to be little focus on keeping the terms "the left" and "liberals" straight. While JK starts, rightly, by putting Hitchens and Berman on the left, by the end of the piece, he's handed the left off to some ultra-post colonial academic. Why? Someone who apologizes for gay oppression is as much a member of the left as an apologist for big government is a conservative. Why honor him by pretending that he's "the left"?

Further, I wouldn't be so sure that those who decry American excesses and unilateralism, cannot be opposed to violence and oppression in the Muslim majority world.

In fact, if anything, many such people, located in our academies no less, were and are leading the charge against theocracy, anti-semitism, fundamentalism, and disenfranchisement in the Muslim world. This was why I found Horowitz' strange assertion that the academies aren't concerned with, let's say, the oppression of Muslim women, to be utterly laughable. For JK to implicitly buy into that is regrettable.

It was at a university where I met Riffat Hassan, the well-known Pakistani anti-honor killing activist from the University of Louisville. It was at a university where I met Amina Wadud, the Quran scholar, who was the first woman to lead a mixed-congregation prayer in recent Muslim history and quite courageously challenged Muslim patriarchy. It was at a university where I met Abdullahi An-Naim, the Sudanese Islamic scholar whose message calls for the equality of men and women in and whose teacher was executed in 1983 for such ideas (and who has subsequently argued for Islamic secularism and is going back to Sudan). It was a university where I met Rafia Zakaria, the feminist activist whose commentary on issues affecting Muslim women is published in Pakistan and India (currently on her way to Pakistan). It was at a university where I heard of Laleh Bakhtiar who has now published a feminist translation of the Quran (and we know how important translations of the Quran are in the fight against extremism). It was at a university where I encountered the work of Ziba Mir-Hosseini, the Iranian activist whose speciality is Muslim divorce law, with a focus on women's rights in Iran. IT was an American university which was home to Haleh Esfandiari, the soft-spoken Princetonian who became a prisoner of conscience at Iran's Evin Prison.

In fact, the universities have been on the forefront of supporting many Muslim reform projects, and the area of Muslim women is not the only one they have supported.

It was at a university where Iranian dissenter and Nobel Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi went to make her speeches. It was at a university where Akbar Ganji, the Iranian dissenter, went to consult with leading left philosopher Richard Rorty. It was at a university where a Jewish Studies professor Deborah Lipstadt started to translate anti-holocaust-denial books into Arabic and Farsi. It was a university that gave shelter to Muslim scholars from South Africa whose homes were firebombed. Even that reviled leftist Juan Cole started up an Americana Translation project in order to send our classical liberal books – Hobbes, Locke and Jefferson – to the Arab world.

Having met most of these aforementioned people, I know that they know their Fanon, quite enjoy Edward Said, have been influenced by the post-colonial left, and even reject the term "Islamofascism." Yet, I submit that most of them do more to combat the things that JK is rightly outraged about than he or I are doing (no offense). We liberals should be trying to make alliances with the most promising of such individuals, not marginalizing them.

An internal critique of the left like the one JK engaged in his post, which does not bring to light the positive work of such people – such left-leaning people – sounds less like liberal introspection (which is what I assume its supposed to be) and more like the usual far-right polemic against the apathetic and naive leftist.

The left is hardly apathetic to issues of Islamic theocracy and violence. Just one bit of proof lies in the fact that as we speak, Alternet -- condemned by many liberals as a hopeless progressive site -- has my piece on the Making of the Muslim Left on its frontpage.

Read Kirchick's Original post, and his Counter-Reply to this one.

Last seen preciously explaining why "[t]he discussion of [Che] Guevara is still divisive and complicated, years after his death, and it should be," the good folks over at Campus Progress have launched a jihad on use of the word "Islamofascism." They've been prompted to do so by David Horowitz's "Islamofascism Awareness Week," a right-wing roadshow that the former left-wing radical is taking to college campuses across the country. Anyways, it would be nice if liberals expressed as much outrage over actual Islamic Fascism as they have at David Horowitz's supposed exploitation of it for his own, nefarious political purposes.

The first (of many) errors in the piece is its authors' (Annika Carlson and Sarah Dreier) attempt to label the use of "Islamofascism" a "conservative smear tactic." It's true that many of those who use the word are "conservatives," but it was neither originated by conservatives nor is there anything inherently "conservative" about it's use." Christopher Hitchens, no conservative he, wrote about "fascism with an Islamic face" to describe the September, 11th terrorist attacks. Paul Berman is also a popularizer of the term. The authors attack Stephen Schwartz (a Jewcy contributor) without bothering to mention that the man is himself a Muslim and a scholar of Islam. But, alas, he is brushed off as a writer for the Weekly Standard, and thus his thoughts can be discarded.

Carlson and Dreier also take issue with the fact that "the term Islamofascism is offensive to Muslim Americans." Boo-hoo. There's nothing remotely offensive in the use of this phrase unless one is an intended target of its wrath, in which case, you're already offended by America's lascivious culture. Simply put, Muslims who are not themselves fascists -- who do not believe in the imposition of Sharia law, the stoning of women, the beheading of gays, the abolition of secularism -- have a duty to distinguish their peaceful Islam with that of the type that's trying to destroy Iraq and acquire nuclear weapons.

There's a lot of this walk-softly, lets-hold-hands type of stuff in the essay, and the best case for the continued use of the "Islamofascist" descriptor comes, unsurprisingly, from Christopher Hitchens. He was not responding to the Campus Progress piece in particular, but likely anticipated the liberal reaction that would likely follow from Horowitz's deliberately provocative campus outreach project. Hitch first points out that the Left has never had a problem using the word fascist to describe its political enemies (and I'll add that "fascist" flows from liberal lips today like shit from a goose when describing the Bush administration), particularly when referring to the ties between the Catholic Church and right-wing, authoritarian governments in Latin America, Spain and the Balkans. It appears then, that the Left's aversion to use of "Islamofascism" has much to do with the simple fact that Islam is a non-Western religion, supposedly comprised of the wretched of the earth, and thus, a different standard must apply to its most fanatical adherents, whose real motivation must, at "root" be a legitimate anti-imperialist impulse (for the most sinister and perverse form of this sort of thinking, see my essay on Columbia University professor Joseph Massad's rationalization of Muslim state homophobia as just that).

Read Ali Eteraz's Reply to this post, and Jamie Kirchick's Counter-Reply.