It's all relative, according to Big Al

In the Fall 2007 issue of Columbia Magazine, Robert O. Paxton responds in the Letters section as follows:

I am glad [he] got something out of my fascism book, but I fear that he did not read me very closely. I explicitly reject the term “fascism” for Islamic jihadists on two grounds: (a) they are not reacting against a failed democratic experiment, and (b) they are not coming to the rescue of any one particular nation-state. The term “Islamo-fascism” seems to have been designed for the purpose of transferring the visceral antagonism aroused by the word fascism to Islamic extremists, and even to Muslims in general, which is a Manichaean worldview that seems to me particularly unhelpful. The Islamic jihadists are evil, and we should all want to protect ourselves from being blown up by them, but they don’t fit into the category of fascism very well, unless we redefine fascism as all bad people of every sort.

In other words, Paxton's rejected term gives fascism a bad name. I guess Big Al was right, as usual.