Islamic Fascism, or Zionist Fascism?

The label ‘Islamic fascism’ has been thrown around by the far right for a long time. Now Bush has labelled Hizbollah ‘Islamic Fascists. Why has Bush gone all the way to demonise Islam? This can only be to deflect attention from the sheer barbarism of the US and Israel exporting democracy via missile launches onto the poor people of Gaza and Lebanon. Who really deserves the label ‘fascist’ today?

Bush wants to upgrade the crusade against Islam into a new war against fascism

How convenient when the US is suffering setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Israeli’s cannot destroy Hizbollah despite 10,000 troops, drones in the air and spies on the ground. Labelling Hizbollah fascist also serves to split Hizbollah from the rest of Lebanon in the UN ‘ceasefire’ deal that will see Lebanese troops replace the Israeli’s and Hizbollah between the Israeli border and the Litani River.

But there are obvious objections to Bush’s label as well as less obvious ones that need to be understood. Here is Juan Cole’s view of Bush attempt to invoke the label fascism to give new lift to the war on terror.

Cole shows that fascism cannot apply to Islam in even a superficial way. He says that Islam is inconsistent with fascist ideology. Hizbollah has no state to terrorise people and it has entered the Lebanese parliament to take advantage of democracy. Moqtada al Sadr in Iraq is participating in the Iraqi puppet regime that Bush would not possibly describe as fascist. Both are minorities in their national parliaments.

Cole doesn’t attempt to go into the underlying fallacies. Fascism arose out of deep crises in modern imperialist states in Europe in the 1920s where proletarian revolution was on the agenda. Fascism mobilised the declining middle class in a movement to smash the proletarian vanguard. In wars against fascist powers, workers in imperialist ‘democracies’ try to take control of the armed forces so that instead of shooting workers conscripted to fight for ‘fascist’ countries, they collaborate to turn their guns on all the ruling classes.

In Lebanon, it’s clear that Hizbollah has massive popular support despite Israeli attempts to split Christian and Sunni Lebanese from it. Hizbollah is a popular, democratic militia that is based in the Shia and Palestinian working class rather than trying to destroy it. It does not kill Israeli conscripts in the IDF except in defence of its military positions. Not does it kill prisoners of war or target civilians except in reprisal to Israeli bombs and missiles. It is the success of the ‘democratic’ struggle of Hizbollah to defend Lebanon from Israel’s invasions that Bush and Olmert find so threatening. Their response is to demonise it as fascist and insist that it be disarmed by UN forces.

Perhaps Hizbollah can be labelled ‘fascist’ by association with Iran?

The Shia theocratic regime in Iran is based on the small bourgeoisie of the bazaar and has some of the features of European fascism. There is a reactionary theocratic state and the ‘revolutionary’ guards are like fascist gangs used to attack any democratic opposition. To apply the term ‘fascist’ to characterise such a regime is imply that the main purpose of the capitalist state is to smash the proletarian revolution.Yet this regime is a reaction to a history of imperialist coups, puppet regimes and proxy wars and is not first and foremost a movement to smash the revolutionary threat of workers to overturn the semi-colonial capitalist state. However, in so far as such regimes do engage in the destruction of the revolutionary leadership of the labour movement by mobilising paramilitaries based on the middle class, they can be considered ‘semi-fascist’.

In wars between such semi-colonial authoritarian regimes (even when they are fascist) and imperialism, we must take the side of the semi-colonies, despite their reactionary rulers. Trotsky backed Haile Selassie against fascist Italy in the 1930s even though Haile Selassie appeared to be more reactionary than Mussolini. Trotsky was even prepared to support a form of the semi-fascism in Brazil against US imperialism. Nevertheless we know that only the workers have the class interest to fight imperialism to the death, and that sooner or later the national bourgeoise will resort to semi-fascism to smash the revolutionary proletarian movement. That is why in such wars we fight for the masses to overthrow their capitalist leaders or all political colours as a necessary condition of defeating imperialism.

Clearly, even if Bush’s label ‘fascism’ did apply to Hizbollah, Hamas, the Iraqi Shia resistance, as an extension of a ‘semi-fascist’ regime in Iran (which they are not) they are a reaction to imperialist oppression and are based on the anti-imperialist working class. They are not directed principally at smashing a revolutionary leadership but rather harnessing it to nationalist movement. Rather than condemning such Islamic movements or regimes, we have an obligation to defend them from imperialism while at the same time working to overthrow them by means of popular workers and peasants revolutions.

Why doesn’t Bush call the Zionist state Fascist?

All the features of European fascism, or semi-fascism, are much more obvious in Israel. But to recognise this would not only destroy the attempt to demonise Islam as fascist, it would expose and destroy the pretentions of lsrael to any democracy and furthermore to any right to exist on Palestinian land. Let us see how Bush’s arguments can be easily turned around in the case of Hizbollah, Hamas and the Iraqi Shia.

So George Bush thinks Hizbollah are now Islamic Fascists. What is it about them that makes them fascists? They are a liberation movement that arose out of the 18 year Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon between 1982 and 2000. They contest the parliamentary elections and have 12 seats in the Lebanese parliament. They are a popular, democratic militia that does not engage in political assasinations. They are more popular and democratic than the militia that fought Britain for US independence over 200 years ago.

On the other hand, the Israeli occupying force Hizbollah drove out of Lebanon in 2000 was founded in blood and terror in 1948 causing the diaspora of millions of Palestinians, over 500,000 to Lebanon. The Zionists objective in invading Lebanon in 1982 was to smash the Palestinian resistance. Israel allied with the Christian Falange fascist militia and under the leadership of General Sharon slaughered up to 3000 innocent civilians, women and children in the refugee camps of Sabla and Shakira.

So George Bush thinks Hamas are Islamic fascists. Why is that? Hamas won the elections in what today passes for ‘Palestine’, that is, the ‘bantustans’ on the West Bank and Gaza where several million Palestinians are concentrated into refugee camps. No sooner had Hamas won the election, Israel supported by the US, blocked payment of funds necessary to keep the Palestinian National Authority running. Then, when the Hamas Members of Parliament voted to recognise Israel’s right to exist, Israel arrested the leadership, and bombed and invaded Gaza and parts of the West Bank.

So George Bush thinks that the Shia resistance in Iraq is Islamic fascist. Would this be the same Shia that was repressed by the US backed dictator Saddam Hussein for decades? The same Shia that live across the Iranian border and who were brutally killed in their 100s of thousands during Saddam’s 8-year war again backed by the US? The same Shia that rose up against Saddam after the 1991 Gulf war only to be betrayed by the US (UN) forces to Saddam’s murder squads? Now the same Shia who have formed a militia very similar to Hezbollah, with a broad social base in the South of Iraq, and which has joined the new Iraqi government? One doubts that George Bush would call his stooge government a puppet or fascist government.

Then of course George Bush thinks that the Nazi general staff behind the Islamic terror everywhere are the Iranian mullahs, Ahmadinejad in particular. The Iranian regime is a right-wing clerical regime that represses democratic opposition, but it is nationalist and anti-imperialist and even voted into power periodically. It originated in 1979 as a national revolution against the tyranny of the US backed Shah, himself put in power by the US when it overthrew the popular government of Mossadegh in 1953. It represents the backward national bourgeoisie of the bazzar against imperialist plundering and oppression. Whatever its rightwing reactionary clerical interests, it is nationalist and anti-imperialist and is only interested in suppressing democracy to retain the lead of the nationalist movement, not in smashing a non-existent working class socialist vanguard.

Zionist Fascism ‘sui generis’

George Bush throws the label fascism around to attempt to demonise and de-legitimise the Islamic resistance to Israel and imperialism in the Middle East. But in his ignorance he overlooks the one candidate for fascism in the Middle East, the US gendarme, the Zionist state of Israel.

If George Bush knew his history and geography he would know that Zionism was an extreme nationalist movement for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine that did deals with both the Allies and the Ottomans in the first war, and both the Allies and the Axis in the second world war. Worse, the Zionists sacrificed the lives of many Jews to the Nazi’s in return for the Nazi recognition of a Jewish state in Palestine.

By the scientific criteria used by revolutionary Trotskyists to characterise fascist regimes in Europe between the wars, Zionist Israel can be considered a form of fascism ‘sui generis’ (fascism with special characteristics).


(1) First, like Fascism, Zionism was a reactionary response to extreme capitalist crisis in the epoch of imperialism.

The Zionist movement collaborated with the imperialist powers to found a national state for Jewish capital facing a crisis of profitability in the capitalist economies of Europe. It was an extreme reaction to capitalist crisis in the epoch of imperialism. Israel was intended to be the geographic territory for the recolation of surplus Jewish capital and labour. In this regard the special characteristic of Israel is that it was a new capitalist state founded in an epoch when no national capital could stand alone and so was necessarily forced into a semi-colonial dependence on imperialism. Clealy this marks Israeli fascism as ‘semi-colonial’.


(2) Second, like Fascism, Zionism abandoned democracy for repression of the vanguard of the working class.

The repatriation of Jewish labour to Israel in the 1930s contributed to the defeat of the European working class, particularly Jewish socialist workers. The collaboration with the imperialists forced many Jews to adopt Zionism against socialism. The founding of Israel by acts of war supported by imperialism in 1948 were at the expense of the existing Palestinian people who were terrorised, disppossessed, displaced and used as a reserve army of labour. In other words, Israel was founded on the suppression of the most democratic right of Palestinians, that of national self-determination. In this regard the special characteristics of Israel were that first, it was an indirect agent in the smashing of the revolutionary socialist movement in Europe, and second, as a new state its existence required the forced dispossession and enslavement of the Palestinian working class.


(3) Third, like Fascism, Zionism provided an extreme nationalist and racist ideology to justify its occupation of Palestine.

Zionism is a reactionary nationalism which holds that Jews are ‘different’ and cannot be assimilated. This made it a natural ally of the fascists who wanted Jews to be eliminated, and the enemy of the workers who when rejecting Zionism for socialism had much more success in evading the Nazi genocide. However, Zionism elevated Jews to a similar racial ‘superiority’ as the Nazis did to the ‘Ayrian’ race. In the occupation of Palestine, almost all land is reserved for Jews. Arabs who live inside the 1967 ceasefire line are denied land ownership and other basic rights. In the so-called ‘occupied territories’ the constant terror used against Palestinians reveals a Zionist racism towards peoples other than Jews. Those who consider this to be merely ‘apartheid’, even if worse than that of South Africa, are merely treating a symptom of the disease which is, in the final analysis, Zionism. This is more than a racist settler ideology, but a fundamental racist myth that Jews are ‘different’ and ‘superior’.

US Fascist? 

Those who argue that Zionism is fascism, without any attempt to justify this scientifically, fall into the same trap as George Bush. They label any reactionary regime as ‘fascist’. Ironically, some are now beginning to use this term to describe the USA of George Bush. Some may think that appropriate, yet in the USA today, unlike Israel, there is as yet no revolutionary threat to a regime in terminal crisis. The Minutemen are probably the precursor of fascist bands organised in response to undocumented migrant workers, but they are far from being a social force capable of repressing the millions of such workers. Until the labour movement begins to rise up and rejects ‘democracy’, we cannot talk about fascism in the USA.

From Class Struggle 68 August/September 2006

Why nuke Iran?

The reformist left is alarmed at Bush and his threat to nuke Iran. They think that Bush is crazy and the alternative is a return to ‘sanity’. Juan Cole says a war with Iran might “alarm” the US public and “could cost the Republican Party its majority in Congress”. Wow, maybe good old US democracy in the form of the Democrats will come to the rescue at home. This would be an interesting twist to Bush's logic, “You envy our democracy, OK we can drop it on you”.

The theme is that the neo-Cons represented by Bush, and by default, the whole Republican Party, are the problem here. After all how else to explain something as 'crazy' as nuking Iran's nuclear installations? Must be the neo-cons. No-one else wants to nuke Iran. The Russians and Chinese have too much at stake. The EU and even poodle Blair are reluctant. Even the Israelis cannot be so stupid (but they might do it if the price was right).

So why go to such lengths to destabilise the 'international community’? Because the neo-cons are crazy (most commentators) wrong (Fukayama) irresponsible (Tony Negri) arrogant elites (Chomsky) or oily Texans (Eisenhower). So wake up US public kick out the Republicans and elect the Democrats.

Are these people blind to what has driven US foreign policy for nearly 200 years? The US has gone to war, overthrown governments, used nukes on Japan, threatened to use them against Vietnam, Cuba and the USSR for years (it was called the Cold War).

What is doing in Iraq and threatens to do in Iran is par for the course. Are we saying that the US was led by crazy, stupid, ignorant Republican Presidents and ruling parties for its whole history? We can easily disprove this. Look at the record of Democrats Roosevelt, Johnson, Carter and Clinton. None of them reneged on wars, sanctions, blockades etc to pursue US imperial interests.

Imperialism is the root cause

Instead of looking for some 'aberrant' cause in the George W. Bush’s personality, new right ideology, cabals of crooks, etc to explain US actions in any particular case, let’s be parsimonious. Let’s try for a one size fits all explanation.

What about imperialism? This accounts for a lot. The US was the ‘first new nation’ to become a super-power able to rival and then dominate its competitors. In the post-WW2 period the US became the dominant global capitalist power occupying its rivals and quarantining the USSR and China.

Globalisation is really about US finance capital taking over the world economy. While no-one else can challenge it, it can do what it likes. There is no UN, or ‘international community’ except as a cover for the US policy of unilateral, pre-emptive assaults. Now it’s so powerful it no longer needs this cover and simply asserts its ‘rights’.

For the US the opportunity cost of running the world is greatest gain for least cost. Having ‘rogue’ states bucking the US is a potential cost in terms of resources and military enforcement. The US ruling class knows that its long term requirement for resources will meet resistance. It must neutralise that resistance in advance.

In the post-Cold War period it has shifted the target from the ‘reds’ who have conveniently opened up their countries to US corporate exploitation. It is not a priority to pursue North Korea as an minor irritant which might risk the investment in a dynamic capitalist East Asia. But they can still pull out the ‘red card’ when former Stalinist politicians like Putin get in the way of US corporate interests in what remains of the old USSR.

The main parts of the world that the US still needs to dominate are in Central Asia. Here client regimes are being established and pepper potted with US military bases. Resistance to US dominance in Asia is demonised as ‘radical Islam’. And the new military target is the potential WMDs of radical Islam. The US does not need another 9-11 to mount a nuclear strike on Iran – it is a continuation of 9-11 and the ‘war on terror’. Iran is already set up as an irresistible target.

Defend Iran’s right to nukes!

This demand is the one that most of the left find hard to swallow. Most people agree that it is wrong for the US or Israel to threaten to use nukes, but they can’t make the step from their to accepting Iran’s right to nukes. For us the issue has nothing to do with nukes as such. Nukes are merely weapons. True they are dangerous and potentially calamitous. But they are weapons essentially. The important distinction is nukes in the hands of imperialism, and nukes in the hands of oppressed countries.

We argue that oppressed countries have the right to defend themselves from imperialist military invasions with whatever weapons necessary. It seems only nuclear weapons are capable of deterring the use of nuclear weapons – e.g. Cuba 1960, Vietnam 1968, North Korea today. The problem therefore is imperialist nukes, not the nukes of oppressed semi-colonial countries. The more the workers in the imperialist countries are able to disarm the military machines of nuclear weapons at home, the less will it be necessary for oppressed countries to resort to the use of nuclear weapons to defend themselves from imperialism.

And just as we expect that the working classes in the imperialist countries will not sit idly by and allow their ruling classes to use nukes, we also expect that the worker, peasant and student masses in the oppressed countries will want to take the control of nuclear weapons out of the hands of the nationalist regimes that share in the exploitation and oppression of the working people. With nukes in the hands of popular militias their use will be determined not by ruling class military adventures but by the defensive needs of the working people alone.

From Class Struggle 66 April/May 2006

Defend the Iranian people! Support Iran’s right to a nuclear deterrent

On March the 18th, protesters will gather in towns and cities around the world to mark the third anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, and the beginning of a war that still kills thousands of Iraqis every month.

This year the anti-war movement faces the threat of a new imperialist war, against Iraq’s eastern neighbour.

The United States is leading a campaign against Iran’s nuclear programme, and threatening the country with military action if it does not dismantle the uranium enrichment technology in its nuclear facilities.

Bush’s government used aggressive diplomacy to make sure that the International Atomic Energy Agency voted to send the issue of Iran’s nuclear programme to the United Nations Security Council, where the US has a permanent seat and immense influence. Bush has repeatedly said that is prepared to use violence to stop Iran’s nuclear programme even if he can’t get his way on the Security Council.

Iran’s government maintains that its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, and after the lies they told about Iraq’s phantom ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ the US and other Western governments can’t be trusted when they say they are certain Iran is trying to make nuclear weapons.

But even if Iran is seeking nukes, what right do the US and its allies have to complain?

The US is a country with many thousands of nukes aimed at targets around the globe and a history of aggressive action against scores of other states. The Middle East’s neighbourhood bully and US ally Israel sits on an arsenal of several hundred warheads.

Both the US and Israel continue to build new nuclear weapons – what right do they have to condemn Iran if it wants to do the same?

Poll after poll shows that Iranians support their country’s nuclear programme, and believe that they have a right to nuclear weapons.

Even the pro-Bush media admits the popularity of Iran’s nuclear programme. Karl Vick, the Iranian correspondent for the pro-Bush, pro-war Washington Post, recently admitted that ‘Ordinary Iranians overwhelmingly favour their country’s nuclear ambitions, interviews and surveys show’.

Why are the Iranian people so keen on nukes?

Some racist commentators in the Western media have suggested that it is because they are a fanatical, bloodthirsty people, who long to fight a holy war against the US and Israel. But the Iranians know better than almost any other people the bloody reality of war. In the 1980s a million of them died defending their homeland against an invasion by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. At the time Saddam was an ally of the US, and the US had encouraged him to invade Iran because it wanted to topple the government there. More recently, Iranians have watched the US fight two bloody wars against Iraq. The war that began in March 2003 is estimated to have killed 150,000 Iraqis already. Now the Iranians hear Bush threatening attacks on their own country.

It is because they don’t want another war that the Iranians want nukes. Iranians realise that nukes would be a powerful deterrent against an attack by the US. They can see that the US invaded Iraq knowing that it had no Weapons of Mass Destruction, but backed away from attacking North Korea because that country had developed nukes.

A look at the whole history of the nuclear era bears out the Iranian point of view. The US says that nuclear proliferation is a threat to world peace, but the only time nukes have been used was before nuclear proliferation began, in the days when the US had a monopoly on the weapons. US President Harry Truman bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki not to defeat Japan, which was already about to surrender, but to intimidate the rest of the world, and especially the Soviet Union and Red China. The US wanted to use nukes to make sure it controlled the post-war world.

In 1950 the US was bogged down in a war against Korea, and General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of their army, drew up plans to explode thirty nukes inside territory held by the North Korean army. Millions of Koreans were saved from death only because the Soviet Union had recently developed its own nukes as a deterrent to US aggression. The US was forced to shelve MacArthur’s plan after the Soviets threatened to retaliate for any nuclear strikes in Korea. Again and again in later years, the Soviet nuclear deterrent saved vulnerable Third World countries from US aggression. Who can blame the Iranians for wanting the same deterrent?

Most Kiwis dislike George Bush and oppose the wars he has started

At the same time, though, many of us are uneasy about the prospect of another country developing nuclear weapons. If a poll were taken today it is likely that only a fraction of us would support Iran’s right to nukes. But we only think like this because we haven’t stood in the shoes of Iranians and other peoples threatened by US imperialism. We live on islands at the bottom of the world, far away from hotspots like the Middle East. We’ve never been invaded, and we don’t have the hostile army of a nuclear superpower camped on our doorstep. The Iranians don’t have the luxury of rejecting nuclear weapons, and we need to understand that. If we don’t, we risk taking the side of the US and Israel in a new war.

The Green Party has already fallen into the trap of supporting the US campaign against Iran, by urging that the UN be used to ‘restrain Iran’.

Others are in danger of going down the same path. In a debate on the Indy media website, one activist said that he wanted to show ‘solidarity with anti-nuclear sentiments among the Iranian and wider Middle Eastern population’. If he looks, he will soon find that the only people in the Middle East interested in campaigning against Iran’s nuclear programme are Israelis and the US armed forces. Anti-war activists should show solidarity with the Iranian people by supporting Iran’s right to nukes.

But solidarity with Iran doesn’t mean political support for the country’s government

Iran is run by a gang of Islamic fundamentalists who hijacked the 1979 revolution against the US-backed Shah. The fundamentalists took power by killing their secularist rivals on the left, and they use violence to stay in power. In the last few months, for instance, the Iranian police and pro-government paramilitary organisations have been attacking and detaining the bus drivers of Tehran. The bus drivers have been campaigning and striking for better conditions and union rights, and three hundred of them have been detained for this ‘crime’.

It’s not only trade unionists that the Iranian government attacks

Iranian women are regularly stoned to death for ‘crimes’ like adultery and pre-marital sex, and gay men are often hung if they are caught having sex.

We should support the Iranian nuclear programme, but we should also support trade unionists and other groups fighting against government repression.

Some Westerners argue that there is a contradiction between these two types of support. They say you can’t support Iran’s right to nukes without giving political support to the country’s government. What they ignore is the fact that Iranian people themselves support their country’s nuclear programme, at the same time as many of them oppose their country’s government. As Karl Vick notes, “Support [for the nuclear programme] runs deep in the population of 68 million, cutting across differences of education, age and, most significantly, attitudes toward the fundamentalist government”.

When we gather next month to mark the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, we should also protest against the aggression of the US and the UN against Iran. But we can only oppose Bush’s new war drive by taking the side of the Iranian people by supporting Iran’s right to a nuclear deterrent.

Leaflet issued by Workers Against the War Of Terror (WAWOT) February 2006

From Class Struggle 65 Feb/March 2006