The “They’re Not All Like That” School

     ...has been taking it in the shorts. Apparently, pollsters have started asking the right questions:

     It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that with 1.6B Muslims, even if 10% of them were radical, that’s 160 million people: about half of the total US population. But in looking closer at their survey, I’d put the number closer to 25%.

     My analysis focused only on the questions about Sharia law: (1) Should the law of the land be Sharia law?; and (2) should that apply to everyone, including non-Muslims? Pew asked question (1) in countries that account for about a billion Muslims, and question (2) in countries that account for about 830 million. If you accept their results in just the countries they surveyed, we learn that:

• 70%, or 700 million Muslims out of the billion represented by Q1 of their survey, want Sharia law to be the law of the land;
• 32%, or 266 million Muslims out of the 840 million represented by Q2 of their survey, want to force it upon everyone.

     I don’t know about you, but I’d say that alone represents over a quarter billion “radical” Muslims, with only just over half (53%) of their total population accounted for by the survey.

     But we can make reasonable (and conservative) assumptions about the rest of them, and the results are even scarier. I extrapolated Pew’s results in each region (e.g., Central Asia) across the whole region, using the smallest percentages that they found for the countries in the region they did survey. The lower-bound estimates I get for the world Muslim population are as follows:

• 63%, or just under a billion Muslims, want Sharia law;
• 38% of those Muslims, or about 370 million, want to force it on everyone.

     Shari’a law is the portion of the Islamic creed that dictates such things as death for apostates, heretics, blasphemers, homosexuality, adultery, the consumption of alcohol, and being unfortunate enough to get raped while not in the presence of four male Muslim witnesses indisposed to side with the rapist(s). 38% of the Muslims surveyed want to force it on you and me. Let that sink in while I fetch more coffee.

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     Ponder the assemblage of deflections and demurrers we usually hear from Muslim-mouthpiece groups after an Islam-powered terrorist act:

• “That’s not true Islam.”
• “We’re not all like that.”
• “That had nothing to do with us.”
• “It’s because of your policies.”
• “Backlash! Islamophobia!”

     In particular, we always hear about “religious freedom” whenever some braver than average soul suggests that Islamic immigration be curtailed, mosques be kept under observation by the FBI, or preachers of jihad be expelled from the country. By masquerading as a religion, Islam wins free of the sort of scrutiny and careful handling that would be applied to any similar ideology that disdained that label.

     If we accept the Pew statistics presented above as reasonably accurate, we’re nudged rather forcefully toward the dismissal of those deflections and demurrers. About a third of the Muslim population of the world admits that it condones (if not encourages) violence in the service of Islam. If we omit all speculation about Muslims who “told the pollsters what they wanted to hear,” that’s one in every three. At least a third of world Islam, therefore, will be inclined to support, protect, and perhaps even facilitate the jihadist fraction: i.e., the fraction that puts the assertions of shari’a into action.

     Stipulate that “they’re not all like that.” Stipulate that two out of every three are sufficiently decent to make tolerable neighbors and fellow citizens. Enough of them are “like that,” at least in their sympathies and inclinations, to present a threat to the West that exceeds that of any recognized nation-state in history.

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     Other totalitarian ideologies have disdained to wear the protective guise of a religion. Of course, most of them have been of more recent origin than Islam, whose roots are in Seventh Century Arabia. Nevertheless, note that all totalitarianisms, regardless of names, specific tenets, or places and times of origin have been absolutely hostile to the Christian and Judaic faiths, to the point of decreeing the elimination thereof. For there is only one thing a totalitarian ideology cannot abide: a competing source of moral guidance.

     When the competing source of moral guidance is innately superior – and is there anyone reading this, regardless of his personal inclinations, who would argue that Christianity and Judaism are inferior to Islam? – the totalitarian contestant swells with the need to destroy. Invariably, those whose passion exceeds their inhibitions will act on that need.

     Reason has no place in what happens next. Religious freedom? That’s a concept the totalitarian doesn’t even acknowledge, much less argue against.

     Yet we of the West persist in thinking that we can detoxify Islam. We take the "we're not all like that" apologists at their word. We project our own, Christian-Enlightenment attitudes of deference to reason and evidence onto persons who’ve surrendered their will and reason to the commands of a bloodthirsty god. And we profess to be baffled at the consequences.

     More anon.