About a year ago a study claiming that Islamic terrorism wasn’t as dangerous to Americans as “far-right” extremist groups made the rounds on Faceborg and Twidiot.
An old friend used the article to talk about how dangerous and awful white people, as a genre, are. He went on to associate gun owners, as a general subset, as no different from the zealot class of ancient Israelites who railed against Rome with violent intent.
I commented that the stats made no sense as they were neither proportional, nor well timed as they, rather obviously, started counting Jihad related deaths after 9/11. And while the case could be made for excluding an outlier…the issue probably wouldn’t be of concern on the scale it is if A) the outlier didn’t occur and B) the Islamic State didn’t openly agitate against the United States. Ultimately, I deleted my comments and let the conflict slide into the dustbin of Internet history.
Anyway, it’s come up again here:
For one, the foundation did not count the deaths on Sept. 11. Secondly, it did not factor in extraordinary security measures, such as the Patriot Act and the creation of Homeland Security, put in place after 9/11 that prevented a large number of attempted attacks by Islamic terrorists on American soil.Moreover, the foundation’s count does not recognize “the disproportionately high number of attacks by Islamic extremists in the United States, who, even after excluding the victims of 9/11, are still responsible for around 50 percent of the total number of deaths due to extremism, even though Muslims only account for around 1 percent of the total U.S. population,” Holt states.Underscoring all that, Holt said the foundation’s count ignored more than a half-dozen examples of radical Islamic terrorism deaths in the U.S.One of the most glaring omissions, he noted, is the 2002 D.C. Beltway snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, who admitted to authorities that they were inspired by Osama bin Laden and sought to set up a terrorist training camp.
While white supremacist terrorism, or any domestic terrorism for that matter is important. It’s a red herring to suggest that Islamic terrorism isn’t a big deal because other groups do it too. It’s even worse to suggest that since other groups, that no majority agrees with, do it too, that to find fault with Jihadis is a sign of racism. And even more so, it’s outrageous and disingenuous to use poorly interpreted data to show that concern for border security, a sense of feeling at home in the land of your birth, or finding ISIS frightening is a sign of racism.
Anyway, I recommend the article linked as well as Holt’s actual article here.
Leave a Reply