What brings this to mind is President Bush's assertion that we are "at war with Islamic fascism" and "Islamo-fascism."

After the transatlantic bomb plot was smashed, Bush said the plotters "try to spread their jihadist message I call \ufffd it's totalitarian in nature, Islamic radicalism \ufffd Islamic fascism; they try to spread it, as well, by taking the attack to those of us who love freedom."

What is wrong with the term Islamo-fascism?

First, there is no consensus as to what "fascism" even means. Orwell said when someone calls Smith a fascist, what he means is "I hate Smith. " By calling Smith a fascist, you force Smith to deny he's a sympathizer of Hitler and Mussolini.

As a concept, writes Arnold Beichman of the Hoover Institution, "fascism ... has no intellectual basis at all nor did its founders even pretend to have any. Hitler's ravings in 'Mein Kampf' ... Mussolini's boastful balcony speeches, all of these can be described, in the words of Roger Scruton, as an 'amalgam of disparate conceptions.'"

Richard Pipes considers Stalinism and Hilterism to be siblings of the same birth mother: "Bolshevism and fascism were heresies of socialism."