The exact identity of the person who coined the expression "Islamofascism" isn't crystal-clear. But the late Christopher Hitchens should be given credit for defining the term.
The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression-especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"-and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.
Hitchens hit the nail on the head with respect to the cultural and political parallels in the concept Islamofascism. But the thing is that even though Hitchens perspicaciously pinpointed lines of convergence between Islam and fascism, the fact remains that fascism, in the strictest sense, is a narrow and even myopic political idea which emerged in the 20th century and has since expired.
Even though it is convenient to call brutal Islamic regimes like Iran Islamofascist, the brutality of these regimes emanates not from fascism -- but from Islam. Among other things, fascism shuns religion and belief in God, while in Islam, everyone and everything submits to Allah and the Koran, along the traditional lines of religious devotion.
Islam is one of the world's three great religions, but from its inception, it has always also been an imperialistic political organization and has embodied a powerful desire to rule the world and rule over other peoples. No other great religion exhibits this desire.
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