...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.
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.
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.
I read so much, and my old memory is so faulty, that I cannot remember which author in which book spoke about the dangers of "looking in the mirror", of judging the behavior and the goals of others - especially from other cultures - as we would our own. It is such an easy trap to fall into if you aren't paying attention, or refuse to look away from that mirror, as so many people do.
ReplyDeleteI have written many, many times of the fact that islam - true, orthodox islam, as there is no "moderate" or "radical" islam, only islam itself - cannot be reformed, changed, softened, moderated or otherwise made acceptable to human beings with any love for the Judeo-Christian morality that the creation of this country was based upon. islam itself, in the qur'an and hadith, states that there _can_ be no change, that the qur'an is perfect and that it would be heresy, apostasy, to even consider changing a single word. (This is spite of the fact that those who actually put mohammed's many - and often contradictory - words to paper _did not even remember much of what they had personally heard him say_. They struggled to come up with what they _thought_ they remembered, or at least what they thought he meant.)
As Fran indicates, the "we're/they're not all like that" apologists are either deluded by wishful thinking or are being deceptive to further their agenda.
Of note should be the fact that so many on the Left actually have closer ties to islam than to Judeo-Christian morals and values. Sex with pre-pubescent girls, sex with "beardless boys" (bacha bereesh), sex with animals, are all approved under islam, and would be popular with Bill Clinton and his friend with the airborne child-brothel, as well as NAMBLA.
The Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, at one time their highest muslim religious leader and secular leader as well, wrote a two-volume book on "codes of conduct. They included permission to have anal sex with your brother, father, son (as well as father-, brother- and son-inlaw), saying that it would not invalidate your marriage to your wife. That a man could legally slake his lust with an infant anally. That you could have sex with an animal but would then have to kill it, and that you could not sell the meat in your village, but any other village would be acceptable.
Yes, at the same time, the Left is so divorced from reality that they are in denial about how muslims treat women and homosexuals, but any of them who even allow themselves to consider those issues are able to convince themselves that it couldn't happen here. They are willing to ignore the possibility or to risk it in return for making our country a place where "anything goes".
Christians may not have all the answers, perhaps might be wrong in some of their beliefs or items of faith. What matters is that the Judeo-Christian moral code is so inherently true in itself, so completely based upon values that are good and protective of all of us, especially innocents who cannot protect themselves, that to continue to move away from that code or to deny it altogether is probably the most harmful thing we, as a nation and as a culture, could do.
islam is a disease. A virulent disease, worse than ebola, that we have ignored at our peril over the centuries since the last Crusades and the fight at the Gates of Vienna. It is invasive and difficult to counter, let alone eradicate. We need to isolate it and destroy it, as we would an outbreak of ebola. It would be good if we could do that without eradicating every muslim, but I'm not at all sure that would be possible.