In the latest issue of Searchlight, Nick Lowles and Steve Silver offer us another example of the increasingly prevalent Islamism = fascism line.

Some of their analysis is unexceptional. When they write that “Omar Bakri Mohammed and his ilk are recruiting sergeants for the BNP”, who could disagree? Indeed, three years ago Inayat Buglawala of the MCB made exactly the same point about Bakri and Abu Hamza:

“Every time these two figures open their mouths it seems they are determined to help the cause of the racist British National Party in their goal of portraying Muslims as being disloyal and potential ‘fifth-columnists’. I doubt whether the BNP have two better recruiting sergeants than Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza.”

But Lowles and Silver go further than this. Take the following excerpt:

“The BNP and Islamist groups also have a symbiotic relationship, their activities fuelling each other. Racism from organisations such as the BNP, high votes for fascists and racist attacks all create a climate in which some young Asians in particular feel that they are victims of, and in conflict with, wider society. In turn, Islamist groups preach that Muslims not only face racism in Britain, but are oppressed across the world, particularly in Palestine and Iraq.”

Er … but isn’t it the case that Muslims are oppressed in Palestine and Iraq? Not necessarily so, according to Lowles and Silver. They refer blandly to “the Iraq war and other perceived [sic] injustices across the world”.

Worse still, according to their formulation, opposition to Zionist oppression of the Palestinians and to the imperialist conquest of Iraq is equated with the BNP’s racist hatred of minority ethnic groups.

And, as with Islamophobic right-wingers like Anthony Browne, the term “Islamism” is used without distinguishing between its reformist and violent extremist tendencies. The existence of bodies which are Islamist, in the sense of organising Muslims to engage in social and political activism, but which pursue their objectives through peaceful methods, is obliterated

Thus all forms of Islamism are reduced to a variant of fascism.

As Inayat Bunglawala wrote in criticism of Anthony Browne’s Times article that attacked MAB and Qaradawi as fascists: “it simply will not do to glibly compare ‘Islamists’ with Nazis. This type of incendiary rhetoric only adds to the prejudice which British Muslims have to face daily.”