Naming those who want to kill us

Timothy Garton Ash is considering what we should call 'the people who want to kill us'. He thinks we need to be careful about our choice of words. However, there is something strangely arbitrary about his arguments, or so it seems to me.

He doesn't think we should call these people Islamists because, although '[m]ost Islamic terrorists are, in some sense, Islamists... most Islamists are not terrorists'. The problem would seem to be resolved by our calling Islamist terrorists 'Islamist terrorists'. After all, if I speak of 'Jewish extremists' or 'animal liberation terrorists', I don't thereby condemn all Jews or all animal rights activists. But for some reason Garton Ash holds 'Islamists' not to be adequately disambiguated by any such similar conjunction.

He favours calling suicide mass murderers or planners 'jihadists' - this even though, as he acknowledges, 'jihad' may also be understood 'as peaceful spiritual struggle'. That fact would seem to open 'jihadists' to a similar objection to the one he makes against 'Islamists'. Its range of reference is broader than its intended target. But here the greater breadth doesn't seem to matter: the Muslim opinion-leaders he's spoken to are ready to accept this usage, and furthermore in the present case, he says, conjoint locutions like 'jihadist extremists' or 'jihadist terrorists' are helpful in clarifying one's meaning, where for the expression 'Islamists' they just didn't seem to offer themselves.

The term 'Islamofascists' is also not to Garton Ash's liking, despite some 'very suggestive resemblances between the mentality and life-paths of self-styled fascists of Europe's bloody 20th century and those of the evil men who have bloodied the beginning of Europe's 21st century' - resemblances which he goes on to rehearse. (In the same connection, see Christopher Hitchens.) Garton Ash adduces two reasons against the term 'Islamofascists'. The first is that labelling opponents 'fascists' has been discredited by a too unrestrained throwing around of that word. But this only argues against misuse of the term, against applying it when it's not apt; it doesn't show why it wouldn't be apt in the case at hand - apt precisely because of the resemblances Garton Ash notes. His second reason, if I understand him correctly, is that to speak of 'Islamofascists' is to conflate a death-dealing mentality and a totalitarian regime in power. Whereas fascism in Europe made the transition from one to the other, we can't (yet) say the same of the political forces whose proper designation he is looking for. That this is a dissimilarity is certainly true, but it's not clear why it should be considered decisive, since we need a way of naming movements that don't attain state power as well as those that do, particularly when our objective is to stop them from attaining power.

What suggests itself to me, finally, is the incongruity of Garton Ash's insistence on the need for care with words - a care, to be frank, that spends itself on to-ings and fro-ings of the quite haphazard kind I have sought to demonstrate here, a care without any compelling rhyme or reason - when he himself has opened his article in the following way:

What should we call the people who want to kill us? Islamofascists? Islamists? Jihadists? Or just plain murderers?

Just like that - people who want to kill us, and for whom 'plain murderers' is offered as a candidate designation. And Garton Ash doesn't beat about the bush - he knows who he means and he knows we know who he means. It's not Swedish businessmen, Polish or Rumanian migrant workers, Australian backpackers, or disaffected Scots. No, it's Islamofascists or Islamists or Jihadists, establishing one, and only one, connection between terrorism and the religions - or for that matter other doctrines - of the world. And Garton Ash professes a concern not to make unnecessary enemies amongst Muslims.

Do his opening questions, then, display the care he urges upon his readers? I don't think so. He simply names a connection that already exists in certain well-known contemporary facts and takes it as the only such connection going. Does this make Timothy Garton Ash an Islamophobe? I wouldn't say so. He didn't invent those facts; he's merely registering them and their current prominence. Yet the piece that follows his blunt opening questions makes great play of the need for making careful distinctions - distinctions, in fact, that make no real difference. It's like a will towards a form of virtue that proves empty of all substance.