by Nick Cohen| The Guardian


Without knowing or caring, Kurds protesting against the world’s willingness to let Kobani fall to Islamic State have inflamed two acute causes of western discomfort. They had no hesitation in describing radical Islam as “fascism” and seeing Kobani as our generation’s Guernica. They were equally quick to ask the “international community” a question it does not want to hear: for how many more years will it allow one of the world’s largest and most persecuted ethnic groups to live without a state of its own?

“Flow in waves to Kobani,” demonstrators chanted as they mounted vain protests against Turkish inaction that amounts to collaboration. “Stop Isis fascism.”

To me, it seems obvious that militant religion is a radical reactionary force. In whatever form it comes, it grinds down on women’s rights and denies the basic freedoms of liberal society. It is equally clear that its Islamist variant relies to an extraordinary degree on fascist Europe’s Jewish conspiracy theories. If you doubt me, look at the declaration in Hamas’s founding covenants that Jews “were behind the French Revolution [and] the communist revolution”. It might have come from Hitler. (Although even Adolf would have hesitated to repeat Hamas’s claim that Jews also created “the Rotary Clubs [and] the Lions” to achieve “Zionist interests”.)

Radical Islam, like fascism before it, wallows in the cult of death: “Death to intelligence! Long live death!” cried Franco’s general José Millán Astray in 1936. “We love death more than you love life,” cry today’s Islamists fighters. There is the same support from the financiers and businessmen, from what we old leftists used to call the capitalist bourgeoisie, and the same shared belief that women can never aspire to be anything other than dutiful wives.

In one respect, radical Islam trumps the fascists and, indeed, the communists. The old totalitarianisms could promise their followers that death would lead only to the greater glory of the Fatherland or the inevitable triumph of the working class. An Islamist can tell his willing executioners that death will not only further Islam’s global triumph but take the martyr to paradise too.

I cannot find good grounds for disagreeing with the Iranian leftists who call radical Islam the fascism of our time. No one says you cannot talk about the “Christian right” in America, or describe the messianic Jewish settlers in Israel’s occupied territories as “ultra rightists”. Talk of the Islamist right, however, or mention its links to the fascist tradition in the west, and you are met with angry incomprehension. I have lost count of the number of times opponents have told me that fascism was based on states, not religions. A few accepted that it was legitimate to describe Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as fascistic. It had all the trimmings: the great leader with his picture on every TV screen and the one-party state determined to exterminate the racially impure – the Kurds, in the case of Iraq. But, they continued in chiding tones, to use the same language about religious extremists was to play a dangerous linguistic game.

Many liberals fear that condemning radical Islam in clear leftwing language will allow the white far right to paint all Muslims as extremists. A principled liberal-left would, in truth, dismiss their concerns and oppose both white racism and religious prejudice with the same force and, as I am fond of saying, for the same reasons. It has all the more cause to do so now that radical Islam has a state, the Islamic State, with its own supreme caliph, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, and all the modern weaponry the Iraqi army left behind when it fled.

Like Saddam Hussein, Islamic State is determined to use its weapons to exterminate Kurds. If you live in Iraqi Kurdistan, the fine distinctions between fascist state-based totalitarianism and religious totalitarianism have vanished. All you know is that for decades, mass murderers have marched towards your homeland wanting to slaughter you because you are from the wrong race or worship your god in the wrong way.

Iraqi Kurdish friends describe the decade after the fall of Saddam Hussein as their “golden years”. In Iraq, if not in the Kurdish areas of Iran, Syria and Turkey, they had autonomy. The economy boomed and, despite the usual problems with corruption brought by the exploitation of oil, Kurds built a decent society with protections, albeit imperfect, for the rights of women and religious minorities. Even though the peace ended with the attacks of Islamic State, the outsider might think that the Kurds’ fortunes were still improving.

After two decades in which liberal westerners would champion the rights of stateless Palestinians but never mention stateless Kurds, there are heartening stirrings of camaraderie on the European left. More significantly, America and Europe need Kurds. Obama and Cameron assure their voters that there will be no “boots on the ground”. The Kurdish peshmerga will do our fighting for us. The Kurds have fought Saddam Hussein, once a western ally and then a western enemy. They are now fighting Islamic State, which our leaders condemn as the most barbaric movement on the planet. The normal rules of politics dictate that they should be rewarded for their sacrifices, particularly when a suitable reward is so easy to find.

Iraqi Kurds are organising an independence referendum, on the grounds that Iraq is a failed state whose borders were drawn by dead European colonialists and whose rulers have brought them only terror. Rather touchingly, they sent representatives to Scotland to learn how the civilised world arranged these affairs. They have also learned the bitter lesson that, however liberal their society or courageous their fighters, the civilised world will not accept their right to self-determination.

The west and the Arab states worry that a just settlement for Iraq’s Kurds would upset Turkey, even though the Iraqi Kurds are scrupulous in their support for an internal Turkish-Kurdish peace protest and make no territorial claims. Allied to that is the wider fear that freedom for the Kurds, even after all they have suffered and will suffer in the struggles against modern fascism in all its forms, would upset the “stability of the Middle East”.

I have known Bayan Abdul Rahman, Iraqi Kurdistan’s wonderful ambassador to Britain, for years. She is a model diplomat: soft-spoken, polite and discreet. But when she hears lectures about Middle Eastern “stability”, she lets out a most undiplomatic snort.

“Stability?” she shouts. “What stability? How long must we be punished for a stability that doesn’t exist?”