Islamofascism is a term John Kiriakou uses as his standing example of vocabulary manufactured for political effect.
The account
Kiriakou recalls the word appearing suddenly in the media around 2004 and 2005. It then turned out, he says, to have been created by a public relations firm working for the Republican National Committee, which tried hard to push it into regular daily usage. “And it just didn’t catch, and then they just stopped using it.”[1][2]
His conclusion is general rather than confined to the one word: “But it’s all domestic propaganda. All of it.”[2]
The current instance
Kiriakou places “narco terrorist” in the same category — a new term that pro-war commentators began repeating in unison over Venezuela. His objection is that it does not describe anything: to be terrorism there would have to be civilians killed in an attempt to shift politics, “No, that’s not what we’re claiming at all” — the claim is drugs on a boat, and even that has not been demonstrated.[3][4]
What the label does instead, in his account, is foreclose thought. Terrorist “became this label to shut off your brain and shut off your conception of rights or laws of war or due process” — so that the answer to a question about killing survivors of a strike is simply “what are you defending, narco terrorists?”[4][5]
Against that he restates the rule: there are laws of war, and if a strike has been launched and there are survivors who are unable to continue fighting, they cannot be killed. “If you don’t like the law, change the law. Don’t just pretend that you’re the good guy so everything’s okay.”[5]
As a template for later coinages
Kiriakou uses the episode as the precedent for what he sees happening to the phrase “radical left.” “I remember at the end of the George W. Bush administration the Republican National Committee circulated a memo — they got caught circulating a memo — urging everybody who goes on a television news program to speak out against what they called Islamofascism. Well, they just made up the term at the Republican National Committee, and it didn”t catch on. It didn”t catch on in part because somebody leaked the memo and said, ”the Republicans want us to all say Islamofascism so that we have something to rally against.””[6][7]
His conclusion is that the manufactured term is now the norm rather than the exception: “I think that”s what we”re seeing today with the radical left, the radical right. There”s nothing radical.”[8]