Jonah:

Who would have thought that one could have a serious scholarly discussion of fascism on The Corner? A good sign, isn’t it?

First, don’t be so sure about what “the Muslims” or even “the Arabs” will or won’t be willing to talk about. Michael Rubin pointed out here yesterday that some Arabs are indeed talking about Islamic Fascism. It is an entirely legitimate category, and the leading scholars of fascism agree. I hope you have had the chance to read Jim Gregor’s work, for example.

Yes, there were and are enormous differences among the fascists. It is even debatable whether the term is big enough to make room for both Hitler and Mussolini. Certainly there were enormous differences between fascism and Nazism, starting with antisemitic racism. You are quite right to point out that Mussolini, as many Italian secularists, had many nasty things to say about Roman Catholicism.

But that’s exactly my point. That is why it is silly to talk about Christo-fascism with regard to Hitler and Mussolini. But it is right to use the concept–the traditional language is clerical fascism–about movements like the Romanian one. And some think that Jose Antonio’s Falange in Spain might qualify, but it had only a brief period of activity until Franco gobbled it up and Jose Antonio himself was killed, so it’s hard to judge.

Certainly the Nazis exported racist antisemitism to the Middle East, where it found fertile soil and, along with other elements of Nazi doctrine, was adopted by Muslim organizations and Muslim leaders. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was in essence an Islamic agent of the Third Reich. Was he not an Islamic fascist? I don’t see how anyone can contest that, unless you prefer to call him an Islamic Nazi. Khomeini’s vision is Islamic fascism, too. Don’t think that a vision of a return to the past cannot provide a potent revolutionary impulse to a mass movement. Indeed, many on the left, both in the West and in Iran, deluded themselves into thinking Khomeini was a radical socialist of some sort. I referred to this folly in my 1979 Wall Street Journal essay when I called Khomeini a clerical fascist.

Finally, let me again refer interested readers to Eugen Weber’s classic volume, appropriately entitled “Varieties of Fascism.” No doubt it is long out of print, but there are still libraries, right?