Islamofascism: The word that launders war crimes, from Iran to Palestine
Submitted by
Faisal Hanif
on
Wed, 04/08/2026 - 20:24
A term forged in the fever swamps of post-9/11 neoconservatism is being picked up again now to justify the latest western onslaught in the Middle East
Smoke rises after a strike on the Iranian capital Tehran on 5 March 2026 (Atta Kenare/AFP)
On
The carefully collapsed term “Islamofascism” is having its moment. Its use across the western mainstream media and blogosphere - including UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Europe - increased in frequency by 33 percent in 2025 over the previous year, according to my own tracking.
It is appearing in the Jerusalem Post, in neoconservative journals, and in western tabloids keen to frame the illegal war on Iran as a necessary and noble conquest.
The word is not new. But its resurrection, and the purposes it is now being made to serve, demand scrutiny.
The term was forged in the fever swamps of post-9/11 neoconservatism. Its most committed architect was author Norman Podhoretz, who died late last year, just months before his pet project of bombing Iran came to fruition.
According to Podhoretz’s 2007 essay in Commentary magazine, titled “The Case for Bombing Iran”, the latter is not a state with a history, a population, or a society of competing political interests. Iran is merely a front in a global war, and the only appropriate response is air strikes.
In the latest edition of the magazine, his son, John Podhoretz, has taken up the baton, painting a straight line from Nazi Germany to the Islamic Republic of Iran, with the lament that all this could have been avoided if only the US had listened to papa and dropped the bombs two decades ago.
In the intervening period, the term Islamofascism has been nominally specific: the Islamic State (IS) group, suicide bombers, or those who refuse to stop until they are dead. But once you establish that a category of belief places its holder beyond civil protection, the question of who belongs to that category becomes entirely political.
Indeed, the definition has consistently expanded outward - from IS, to Hamas, to Hezbollah, to the Iranian state, to Palestinian civil society, to anyone who expresses solidarity with any of the above. That’s why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was able to proclaim before the world’s media that “Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas”.
Warcraft over statecraft
Netanyahu himself has spent much political capital in trying to tie together Islam and fascism, claiming in 2015 before the World Zionist Congress that the grand mufti of Jerusalem had given Hitler the idea for the Holocaust. The claim was not merely false; it was a fabrication so brazen that it drew rebukes from scholars worldwide, including Israeli ones.
Netanyahu’s claim was not statecraft, but warcraft: it aimed to establish a connection between Palestinian nationalism and the Holocaust, thus making Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “self-defence” against the inheritors of Hitler’s project. The same infrastructure of language has been under construction for decades.
That infrastructure is now pointed squarely at Iran. A piece published in the Jerusalem Post last August by Catherine Perez-Shakdam, executive director of the advocacy group We Believe in Israel, framed pro-Palestinian protests in western capitals as the opening drumbeats of an Iranian-style revolution, comparing London and Paris today to Tehran in 1979. This is advocacy literature dressed as geopolitical analysis.
It licenses strikes, delegitimises dissent, and hollows out international legal norms by pre-emptively categorising their defenders as fascists
The fanatically pro-Israel Middle East Forum, headed by Daniel Pipes, has spent years asking why anti-fascists do not fight Islamofascism, identifying Pakistan and Turkey as the two “main players”.
This is not a genuine inquiry. It is an invitation to adopt the term’s premises: that Muslim political movements and entire countries are fascist by nature, that opposing them is the natural extension of anti-fascism, and that anyone who refuses this framing is either naive or complicit.
This is not a slippery-slope argument. It is a description of what has already happened. Now, the term is finding a place in the British mainstream.
When Muslims in the London borough of Tower Hamlets responded to a march through their streets by what some would consider the modern inheritors of western fascism, the Jewish Chronicle inverted reality by describing them as “Islamofascists”, equating them and not their opponents with Blackshirts. Meanwhile, the Spectator last year cast US President Donald Trump as the “real anti-fascist hero” in his fight against “Islamofascism”.
And a recent segment on GB News saw presenter Alex Armstrong declare the Green Party to be “the closest thing that we have to a thing called Islamofascism in Britain”, citing leaked WhatsApp messages from a party activist group and a motion on anti-Zionism as his evidence.
In a single broadcast, Armstrong collapsed Muslim political participation, Palestinian solidarity activism and the Green Party into a single, undifferentiated civilisational threat, with no analytical basis whatsoever.
Creating an existential threat
This is precisely what analyst Juan Cole identified as the term’s electoral utility: fear-mongering politics dressed as analysis. And it is precisely what author Robert Paxton warned against: a term that frames a population not as a community to be engaged, but as a threat to be attacked.
Other serious scholars remain equally unimpressed, clearly grasping the intention behind the vernacular. Political scientist Anne Norton observed that fascism is a western invention; to reach for it to describe Muslim political movements is projection, not analysis. Scholar Reinhard Schulze called it an epithet designed to split Islam from the rest of humanity.
Not a single credible historian of fascism has endorsed the term. As Cole observed when asking why the term “Zionofascism” was never used: “Groups who yoke the word ‘fascism’ to other religions and peoples are most often trying to divert attention from their own authoritarianism.”
Let's call it what it is: Islamophobia, not 'anti-Muslim hate'
Read More »
None of this has slowed its use. That is because its function was never analytical. It was always pre-emptive: a mechanism for placing Muslim political agency permanently outside the boundaries of legitimate engagement, and for making any resistance to western or Israeli policy indistinguishable, in the public mind, from an existential threat to civilisation itself.
As noted above, according to my own tracking, usage of the term “Islamofascism” increased by one-third in 2025 compared with the previous year, and it was concentrated around three topic clusters: western media coverage of Iran’s internal opposition, the escalation of US-Israeli military operations against Iran, and the framing of Muslim democratic participation in western countries.
The rhetoric moves seamlessly among all three. Women burning hijabs in Tehran become proof of the regime’s irredeemable nature. That’s why death figures from the protests in Iran this past January had to be widely inflated, so British commentators who have made a career out of defending western fascists could now describe Iran’s government as “Islamofascists”.
It is no coincidence that this spike aligned almost precisely with the intensification of Israeli operations against Iran, and the effort to manage western public opinion on the issue.
The word is doing political work. It licenses strikes, delegitimises dissent, and hollows out international legal norms by pre-emptively categorising their defenders as fascists. If you need a permission slip for what is being done to Iran and Lebanon, and what has been done to Gaza, “Islamofascism” is readily available.
The hawks of American and Israeli wars against Muslims began using the word decades ago to justify their fanaticism. It is being picked up again now because what comes next will require it.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Islamophobia
Opinion
Post Date Override
0
Update Date
Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29
Update Date Override
0