An Islamic Fascist is an Islamic Fascist is an Islamic Fascist

The ever-brilliant Victor Davis Hanson tends to write long articles with multiple points. Such is the way of the academic mind.

However since most people can't digest all that information and logic in a single sitting, I will extract one particularly lucid point from his latest article which is titled “Islamic Fascism 101” (the emphasis is mine):

…just as it was idle in the middle of World War II to speculate how many Germans, Japanese, or Italians really accepted the silly hatred of Hitler, Mussolini, or Tojo, so too it is a vain enterprise to worry over how many Muslims follow or support al Qaeda, or, in contrast, how many in the Middle East actively resist Islamists.

Most people have no ideology, but simply accommodate themselves to the prevailing sense of an agenda’s success or failure. Just as there weren’t more than a dozen vocal critics of Hitler after the Wehrmacht finished off France in six weeks in June of 1940, so too there wasn’t a Nazi to be found in June 1945 when Berlin lay in rubble.

It doesn’t matter whether Middle Easterners actually accept the tenets of bin Laden’s worldview - not if they think he is on the ascendancy, can bring them a sense of restored pride, and humiliate the Jews and the West on the cheap. Bin Laden is no more eccentric or impotent than Hitler was in the late 1920s.Yet if he can claim that his martyrs forced the United States out of Afghanistan and Iraq, toppled a petrol sheikdom or two, and acquired its wealth and influence - or if he got his hands on nuclear weapons and lorded it over appeasing Westerners - then he too, like the Fuhrer in the 1930s, will become untouchable. The same is true of Iran’s president Ahmadinejad.

In one blow, VDH shatters the hackneyed argument many use to defend Middle Eastern nations – that the majority of their populations aren’t violent extremists. As history has shown, you don’t need the support of the majority to wreak massive carnage and chaos throughout the world.

The situation with Iran is bad and getting worse. Ahmadinejad is becoming bolder by the day, but what’s frightening is that he personally has little power. He has power because he is the puppet/voice piece for the mullahs who truly control Iran.

For some reason, the situation with Iran reminds me of the ending of “Terminator”:

As she pays him, distant thunder rolls.

The boy yells something in Spanish as he runs off.

SARAH: What did he say?

ATTENDANT (accented): There is a storm coming in.

Sarah gazes at the thunderheads building up out over the desert. Heat lightning pulses in their depths.

SARAH (quietly): I know.