How
many times have we heard that or a similar refrain? Was it alarming news when
Greece defaulted on its bonds? Actually it’s rather habitual; the Government of
Greece defaulted in 1932, 1894, 1860, 1843 and 1826.
People
were shocked by the Jihad attacks in San Bernardino last week, and Paris shortly
before that. But Islam has changed
little over the centuries. Most notable were
the conquest of Spain in 711 (does that rhyme with 911?), the Battle of
Poitiers (or Tours) in 732 when Charles Martel defeated the Muslims, 759 when
Pippin the Short, Charlemagne’s father, drove the Muslims from southern France
and in 1683 when the Muslims reached Vienna. Beyond those few highlights I
tried to summarize the history, but found it impossible. Anyone curious can
internet search, however I found this site useful for the years 355 to 1291: http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/imperialism/notes/islamchron.html
This
constant conquest, or attempted conquest, has made enduring contributions. Count
Dracula is based upon Vlad the Impaler, a 1400’s Romanian prince who defended
his homeland against the Muslim Turks in a bloodbath unusual even for its time.
He borrowed techniques from them, some of which he probably learned as their
prisoner when a younger man. The Muslims conquered Sicily several times and
each time the Sicilians liberated themselves. Usually they fled to the hills
and fought a guerilla war. Because of that experience, they developed a warlord-style of organization that became the genesis of the Sicilian Mafia.
Many
historians contend that the European Dark Ages began when the Muslims
controlled the Mediterranean Sea and trade was cut off. Ironically, other
historians of this period credit the Muslims with preserving the classical
thought the ignorant Europeans had suddenly forgotten. This twist of history certainly
reminds me of the usual role reversal of modern Muslim apologists and their
cries of victimhood.
About
3,200 years ago, Arabians invaded Egypt, Canaan and Syria. They burned cities,
destroyed artworks, razed the temples and mutilated their victims including
cutting off limbs. These were the forerunners of the Muslims. Scholars such as
Robert Spencer believe that the pagan Arabian tribes in later years felt
inadequate to the surrounding Christians and Jews and therefore concocted a
third “Abahamic” faith. But it’s rather apparent that their symbol is still the
moon goddess.
Will
Attorney General Loretta Lynch have me arrested for Islamphobia for retelling
this history? Apologists for Muslim violence always note how history is full of
religious violence. The Spanish Inquisition tortured people to death. During Cromwell’s English dictatorship
celebrating mass was punishable by death. But I have read and repeated numerous
times the obvious. Christianity could heal itself by returning to its roots of
a loving, forgiving Jesus. Mohammad, however, was a child rapist, misogynist
and war monger. The Holy Koran is full
of hate and violence.
I
have nothing against individual Muslims. I once hired one, and felt badly when
he asked for time off for a religious holiday because he did not feel free to
say "Ramadan". We all know that moderate Muslims are afraid to speak up within
their own communities. The well financed and equipped fanatics are a huge percent of the world’s 1.2 billion or so Muslims. Do we face a 100 years’ war, or can Islam reform itself? I have no answer.
Copyright
2015, Mark L. Bennett
“The well financed and equipped fanatics are a huge percent of the world’s 1.2 billion or so Muslims.”
ReplyDeleteOnce again we are asked to accept an unsupported opinion as fact. What do you mean by “a huge percentage”? Rather than wait for your response, I will counter with some readily available facts. I welcome you to look these up:
The Christian Science Monitor published an article last January by Alexander LaCasse. In it he writes:
“While conducting research for a 2014 book he coauthored, "Euro Jihad," Angel Rabasa, a senior political scientist at the RAND corporation, found that Western European intelligence agencies estimated that less than one percent of the Muslim population living within their borders are at risk for becoming radicals.”
Reading further, to summarize from the article, this number would extrapolate to be approximately 325,000 out of 1.6 billion Muslims.
A lot of people. But a “huge percentage”? And this refers to people at risk for radicalization, not actual terrorists. What would cause some Muslims to be at such a risk is a subject worthy of an extensive commentary of its own, including an analysis of how they interpret the writings of the Quran.
CNN published an article in September of last year by Peter Bergen and Emily Schneider, “Jihadist Threat Not As Big As You Think”:
“To see if we could come up with some kind of estimate for the total number of militants fighting with jihadist groups around the world, we asked a range of experts to estimate the number of fighters belonging to various al Qaeda-affiliated or like-minded groups. These estimates appear in a report, which we helped to author, that was released this week by the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Homeland Security Project, a successor to the 9/11 Commission.
“If we tally up the low and high estimates for all these groups, we can begin to have a sense of the total number of jihadist militants that are part of formal organizations around the globe. We found that on the low end, an estimated 85,000 men are fighting in jihadist groups around the world; on the high end, 106,000.”
Again, a lot of people, but a “huge percentage”?
The Pew Research Center’s “FacTank - News in the Numbers”, published on the 7th of this month, provides “answers to some key questions about Muslims, compiled from several Pew Research Center reports published in recent years…”. I would encourage anyone to read it.
Fact Man Strikes Again
ReplyDeleteOnce again D. Norman states that I confuse opinion with fact and that he has the “facts”. His response was almost entirely based upon one adjective or qualifier I used: “huge percent”. He presents some cherry picked articles to find me factually wrong. Therefore my commentary lacks validity and D. Norman does not comment upon its concerns.
How does any exact, but hypothetical, number of likely violent Jihadists correlate with the number of dead and injured and the significant impact of terror upon the quality of public life in civilized countries? Would the figure that 15% of Germans were Nazis in 1933 have produced a different outcome if it were 10 or 25 percent? I consider it pretty factual that activists and fanatics dominate organizations and nations and unduly affect the outcomes.
Are the hundreds of millions of dead Islamic victims arguing about percentages? Do the Europeans now barred from visiting the parts of their cities that have become no-go zones calculate their fear by percentages? Are the women fleeing Sharia law for safe houses say why worry it’s only a small percent? Even D. Norman in his critique of me talks about 325,000 potential radical Muslims. That’s a lot of potential havoc.
“The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding. Muslims who do not join the fight are called ‘hypocrites' and warned that Allah will send them to Hell if they do not join the slaughter…Unlike nearly all of the Old Testament verses of violence, the verses of violence in the Quran are mostly open-ended, meaning that they are not restrained by the historical context of the surrounding text… They are part of the eternal, unchanging word of Allah…” (http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/quran/023-violence.htm) I find this text rather clear. D. Norman states that it depends upon how Muslims “…interpret the writings of the Koran”.
As I have expressed often in my responses to your commentaries, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having an opinion. What I have always had issues with are your statements of opinion that you make as if they are fact.
ReplyDeleteYou made a statement that the violent jihadists are a huge percentage of the word’s population of Muslims. There was no qualifier in that sentence, just the adjective “huge”. A definition of a qualifier is: “…a word or phrase that precedes an adjective or adverb, increasing or decreasing the quality signified by the word it modifies.”
Your above reply is a tacit admission that the truth is not important to you. You never answered my question. You instead resorted to ridicule. You are choosing to treat facts with disdain. In my responses to your commentaries, I have never referred to you with a mocking nickname. I don’t have to.
There are crazy right wing Christian extremists that paint swastikas on Jewish houses of worship. But they are such a tiny minority of Christians that I don’t have enough digits on my calculator to compute their percentage of Christians. I stand by my word choice of huge and consider it factual. Doesn’t that answer your question? It is your opinion, and nothing else, that I treat facts with distain and don’t know the difference between fact and opinion. It’s blatantly oblivious you are only trying to discredit me and saying “Your above reply is a tacit admission that the truth is not important to you” is rather clear on that point. While neither of us will win this disagreement, do you agree that radical Islam is a threat to people worldwide? Yes or no?
ReplyDeleteHere is some factual data that you may decide is opinion:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.wnd.com/2015/12/franklin-graham-144000-american-muslims-not-peaceful/
I had asked you what you meant by huge percentage. You answer “I stand by my word choice of huge and consider it factual. Doesn’t that answer your question?”
ReplyDeleteNo, and here is why: you don’t have a source or sources that identify the number sufficient to qualify as huge. If you did, why don’t you cite it or them? As long as you don’t provide the support for such a statement, then it is merely your opinion that the percentage is huge. I pointed that out before and repeat it now.
I checked out the website you refer to. It claims to be non-partisan. Turns out it is an anti-Muslim hate site, along with JihadWatch and AtlasShrugs and others. Daniel Greenfield (aka SultanKnish) is connected to the site. He is also part of the Daniel Horowitz Center, which I have referred to in the past.
For perspective, here is part of a quote from Mr. SultanKnish that I found in the website islamthreat.com:
“…Thus we can ban Islam from the public sphere, ban Muslim organizations as criminal organizations, criminalize Muslim practices and even denaturalize and deport Muslims who are United States citizens. The legal infrastructure is there. Despite the fact that the United States is far more protective of political and religious rights, within a decade every single Muslim organization, from the national to the mosque level, can be shut down ... and the majority of professing Muslims can be deported from the United States regardless of whether they are citizens or not.
“We can do it. Whether we could or will do it is another matter. It would require rolling back a number of Supreme Court decisions that are a legacy of the corrupted Warren Court. But it was possible post 9/11. It may yet become possible again.”
I contend that the number of violent jihadists do not constitute a huge percentage of the world’s Muslims. The reason I can state that is that I did some research and found some support for that contention. I welcomed you to refer to them or search out more of your own. I’m not trying to “win” a disagreement.
Take 325,000 potential terrorists and divide by 1.6 billion. You’ll have the same problem with your calculator as your example with the crazy Christians. It works out to be .000203125 of one percent. Huge would universally be considered to be a much higher percentage, in my opinion.
If you had cited a reliable source that put it at 1%, then your use of the word would be much more credible.160 million violent Muslim terrorists would be truly alarming. 1% of 1.6 billion = huge to probably most people. .0002% of 1.6 billion, if put in those terms, would probably not. In my opinion.
I don’t have all the facts- I just have a higher regard for them than I do for opinions. I seek out the facts. I have the requisite curiosity to back up my writing with them. Truth matters to me.
Graham gets his information from the site I recommended in my reply above: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/12/07/muslims-and-islam-key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/
ReplyDeleteSee- you don't need to consult World Net Daily.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteD. Norman has taken issue with my use of the word huge and used that to attempt to deconstruct my entire posting to the extent that he accuses me of being dishonest. He then holds himself up in purity as “Truth matters to me”. If you take the low end of figures he submits of possible Jihadists, 85,000, and multiply that by 100 deaths per Jihad attack (some will kill less, but some will be mass casualty incidents) you get 8.5 million victims. I consider that and the likely lesser numbers to be truthfully huge. (But I suppose that being called untruthful is better than his previous slur of calling me a conspiracy theorist.)
ReplyDeleteHe then goes on to cite at length an extreme position from a source I never cited as an attempt at guilt by association. After that he calls the Jihad Watch (Robert Spenser) and Atlas Shrugs (Pamela Geller) websites anti –Muslim hate sites. That is his opinion. But he states this as fact. Apparently he possesses some mystical power by which he, and not others, separate fact from opinion. Others may call his special ability subjectivity, arrogance or hypocrisy. He is, however, correct in calling them partisan. They are both very partisanly opposed to the taking of human life and the destruction of Western civilization. Robert Spenser is an outstanding scholar of religion. I have read one of his books and found him to be exceedingly truthful and objective. Pamela Geller is a former journalist. Her investigative skills are excellent as evidenced in a book of hers that I read.
A snide comment about consulting World Net Daily again illustrates his opinionated attitude. As for huge, time will tell and I hope not tragically
I offer up this article in the Washington Post on Tuesday. It might provide some perspective on Mr. Graham for your readers. I’m guessing that you personally aren’t fond of WaPo- doesn’t have the journalistic chops or the integrity of your apparent go-to, WND (there I go being “snide” again).
ReplyDeleteI think it’s worth a read, especially the part about him calling Planned Parenthood “Nazis”, and supporting Trump’s plan to ban Muslims from the US. But now that he no longer a Republican, I wonder if he will still vote for the Donald.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/12/22/franklin-graham-quits-the-gop-over-planned-parenthood-funding/
I stand by my contention that you could have made a better word choice than huge. But hey, I’m not going to beat the thing to death. It’s your opinion. Who knows- perhaps in the past you looked around at a gathering of fifteen or twenty folks at a tea party get-together and considered that to be huge. Oops- being snide again. Mea culpa.
You need to re-read my replies- in none of them did I ever accuse you of being dishonest. You use that word “accuse” quite a bit when you write about my replies. Also “attack”. Not sure what to make of that.
The website you cited, as well as the ones I named in my above reply, are described as anti-Muslim hate sites. Not my opinion- universally acknowledged. The two authors you admire so much can’t even enter the UK. This from BBC News: “Keith Vaz, chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, who had called for the bloggers to be banned from the UK, said: ‘I welcome the home secretary's ban on Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer from entering the country. This is the right decision. The UK should never become a stage for inflammatory speakers who promote hate.’”
And one more thing- why do you include in your list of sources and links the website “Democrats Against U.N. Agenda 21”. Nobody is up in arms about Agenda 21 save for conspiracy theorists, in my opinion. And if there really are Democrats against it, Rosa Koire’s website doesn’t list any. I looked.
As D. Norman continues his campaign to discredit me the further from reality he wanders. I referenced an article by Franklin Graham which was based upon government data from the World Net Daily website. He doesn’t quibble with the article, but finds an outrageous article or perhaps a pre labeled opinion piece there and tries to associate that to me by deciding World Net Daily was my “go-to” site, the dishonest technique of guilt by association. Anyone who has followed by frequent postings on Facebook knows that I post from across the political spectrum and most frequently from the mid stream media, including his favorite Washington Post.
ReplyDeleteIf he doesn’t think that the potential for Muslim violent extremism is huge compared to the tiny fringe extremists of other faiths that nothing can convince him. As I said, I hope we don’t have to find out through future tragedies. He then again asserts his mystical ability to discern truth by saying that it’s “universally acknowledged” that Pamela Geller and Robert Spenser run anti-Muslim hate sites. He backs up his claim by citing the BBC, a notorious Muslim apologist and often anti-Semitic news organization. To repeat something I’ve said before: Were Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt Naziphobes in 1940? I prefer to be warned before it’s too late. Pamela Geller is under 24/7 armed protection as a result of her courage in speaking out to protect us. He also cites the decision to ban Pamela Geller and Robert Spenser from entering the UK, a weak government that allows itself to be intimated by Muslim threats of violence. This is while the average British citizen fights off Muslim rape gangs and endures parts of their cities as no-go zones. (Note: The UK government is now in financial trouble for supporting all the Muslims on welfare)
Then he makes the fanciful statement: “Nobody is up in arms about Agenda 21 save for conspiracy theorists, in my opinion.” Agenda 21 is the policy of the United Nations and the United States and has been signed on by many counties. This is all a matter of public record. To call those in opposition conspiracy theorists is an attempt to marginalize them as Agenda 21 policies are foisted upon an unsuspecting public.
I found some interesting data on this site: http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/the-untold-story-of-violent-muslim-opinions-graphic-warning/
ReplyDeleteand the video link on that page: by the numbers untold stories of muslim opinions and demographics.
Greg Niskanen
Excellent video. She proves the huge numbers. Thank you.
ReplyDelete