Mindless, publicity-seeking pawns of eeeevil neocons. That's how Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Robert L. Jamieson Jr. sees College Republicans at the University of Washington. Jamieson's gripe, the recently-observed Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week:
Maybe the stunt was fun and games for the publicity-seeking Republican college group. But it's serious business for the folks behind last week's national event, sponsored by David Horowitz of the Los Angeles-based Freedom Center, a conservative think tank. These right-wingers want to grab power by creating campaigns that spread fear and invoke made-up, hot-button words.
Yup, that's College Republicans alright, mindless stooges of vile neocons bent on ruling the world! [cue evil organ music, lightning clap, mad scientist laugh]
To Jamieson, there's no legitimate concern to be had over radical Islamic terrorism, or if there is, College Republicans were creating controversy solely for publicity, not out of a desire to educate or spark discussion.:
Their campaign of terror keeps spreading.
They want to wipe out those who don't agree with their way of life.
They've spilled blood across the planet for eons, finding justification for the evil they do in holy texts.
What do we call them?
What else? Christian-o-fascists!
While we're at it, let's give them a calendar slot -- "Christian-o-Fascism Awareness Week" -- to be celebrated on college campuses everywhere.
Yes, I drummed up this term this week to show extreme ideas aren't confined to one religion. Zealots who wrap themselves in Christianity have blown up abortion clinics as well as claimed the lives of non-believers since antiquity. Jewish extremists whack Palestinians. Muslim nutcases bastardize Islam to justify suicide bombings that kill innocents.
Indeed, Jamieson played the moral equivalency game, lamenting a lack of concern over "Christian-o-fascists" -- Christo-fascists would probably be the analogous term -- but won't or can't point to a nation-state dominated by the perverted teachings of reactionary Christianity, nor to any major terrorist incidents in the past six years at the hands of terrorists claiming inspiration in the words of Christian Scripture.
What Jamieson fails to get, or in the accepted PC parlance of the academy "is not aware of" is the pervasiveness of radical Islam as a driving ideology for the vast bulk of terrorism against the West. The issue is NOT that terrorism is a Muslim-only activity, but that statistically speaking the threat from the Global War on Terrorism hails from radical Islam.
Of course if Jamieson disputes that premise, he should step up and say so, rather than take weak swipes at conservatives using flimsy arguments centered on moral equivalence and genuflection to the fount of wisdom that is the New York Times:
As Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times puts it: "There isn't actually any such thing as Islamo-Fascism -- it's not an ideology; it's a figment of the neocon imagination."
The term, he adds, became a fashionable way for Iraq hawks "to gloss over" the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked us, to Saddam Hussein, who did not.
But hey, the conservative kids on campus don't sweat such pesky details.
They know sometimes it's best to gloss over truths, exploit fear and be only as aware as you want to be.
