As former Bush speech writer David Frum notes, George W. Bush's short-lived adoption of the term 'Islamofascism' has caused the debate on the usefulness of this term (to which I contributed in the following opinion piece, which in turn produced much commentary) to trail off.

Frum does not revive the debate now except to note an instance of Islamist support for the Holocaust-denial promoter, David Irving - a clear-cut case of an identity of interests between Islamists and fascists.

Frum cites a report in the Observer (London) which reveals the following:

1. Asghar Bukhari, a founder member of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC), which describes itself as Britain's largest Muslim civil rights group, donated money to Irving and urged Islamic websites to ask visitors to make donations to his fighting fund.

2. MPAC was banned from university campuses in 2004 after being branded anti-Semitic by the Britain's National Union of Students.

3. MPAC influence however is said to be increasing, not decreasing among British Muslims.

4. MPAC seeks to dislodge Labour MPs who are favourable to Israel and succeeded in doing so when Lorna Fitzsimons lost her seat following an MPAC campaign against her.

5. Fitzsimons later said,"Getting into bed with Holocaust revisionists who are the heroes of racist organisations which use Islamophobia to divide communities on racial and religious grounds is just extraordinary and very, very sad."

Sad, no doubt, but in the age of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, such a nexus is scarcely extraordinary. Totalitarian movements can drop their aversion to each other for tactical reasons - witness the co-operation of Sunni and Shiite Islamists in the Middle East and in Somalia or, going back to 1939, the Nazi-Soviet pact - but never their anti-Semitism. Once it is understood that Jews are the eternal stand-in for the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is the chief obstacle and pet hatred of assorted utopian-totalitarian movements, Bukhari's behaviour becomes perfectly comprehensible.