One of the favorite talking points of the pro-Israeli fascist neoCon Right in the US is to claim that there exists some particular connection between Islam and terrorism or violence around the world. You've heard the hatemongering, I am sure, most recently mouthed at the annual AIPAC conference by Daniel
Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations:
"Most muslims aren't terrorists but most terrorists are Muslim"
(Incidentally, and just to set the record straight: according to the State Department's annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report, until prior to the invasion of Iraq, most terrorist incidents occurred in Latin America not the Mideast, and didn't involve Muslims.)
This myth of Islamofascism is promoted heavily by the pro-Israeli warmongers (read Bernard Lewis' "What went wrong" for example) who insist that Israel's battles against the Palestinians is part of the battle of the enlightened West against "Islamofascism" -- despite Israel own rather long and sordid history of employing terrorism of its own, against Western target as well as fleeing Palestinians.
For example, this is what the former Israeli PM Yitzak Shamir 
once wrote about terrorism:
Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of law in the world: "Ye shall blot them out to the last man."
This myth of Islamofascism has a particularly appeal to those who view the world in tribalistic, "Us versus Them" or "Clash of Civilizations" terms, because it is based on the implicit assumption that the people of the world can be divided into particular, discrete and objectively identifiable groupings, which can further be judged to be "better" or "worse", "backward" or "advanced", "violent" or "non-violent" etc. And, these groupings are usually vaguely identified primarily by ethnicity ("Sinic", "Islamic", "Western", etc) -- which is itself simply a stand-in for race. So, this view is really simply crypto-racism used to justify expansionism and military aggression - a modernized form of 19th century White Man's Burden. After all, race is still a major defining factor in how people view the world - particularly in America (ask any Iranian and he'll tell you stories of how Americans express frustration at the inability to "pigeon-hole" Iranians into their racial classifications - the label "White" being reserved primarily for Anglo-Saxons.)
But the suggestion that Islam is somehow equated with violence or terrorism overlooks many facts. Leaving aside the long, blooy history of the Englightened West at its various atrocities, the Great Islamic Pathology myth is simply a case of a logical fallacy known as cum hoc ergo propter hoc (correlation implies causation.) Even assuming that being a terrorists correlates to being of Arab ethnicity or Moslem religious beliefs, that doesn't mean that Arab-ness or Moslem-ness is the cause of the terrorism.
But in fact there is no particular correlation of Islam or Arab-ness with terrorism either. So, in addition to that logical fallacy, the myth also displays a cognitive error known as confirmation bias (the tendency to select facts to support pre-conceived conclusions.)
The promoters of this myth have arbitrarily taken a large geographic area of the world, stretching from North Africa to Central Asia, arbitrarily labelled it as "the Middle East", and mushed together a variety of violent events there with the disparate people who live in the region, to support a rather broad conclusion about Muslims/Arabs/"those people" are inherently violent, terrorist, opposed to modernity, "hate our freedoms" etc.
Similarly, one could take the area between Tijuana and Tierra Del Fuego, and then attribute the long and bloody history of various misdeeds and atrocities in the history of Latin America to "The Latin Character" or to the influence of Catholicism. Or similarly, one could attribute the long and bloody history of terrorism and warfare in Africa to the blackness of skin color.
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