After 2001 we should’ve just installed 150 million sets of plastic sheeting so the bedwetters could get through the night worry free. Too bad the plastic bed sheet industry doesn’t have the pull it once did.
Everyone always says that the number of muslims who are radical and want to kill people is so “vanishingly” small…what is this actual number? Is it real or is it something made up? How does one even determine how many muslims represent this “small” “tiny” “itsy-bitsy” number/subset of the entire worldwide muslim population with any reliability? I know it aint hundreds and hundreds of millions, but what is a solid reliable somewhat verifiable guess?
Honestly, ManiacMan, it’s impossible to say. For starters, you can’t look into everyone’s hearts and minds to find out whether they’re willing to kill people. There are overtly angry people who march and make threats but would never really kill anyone, and there are quiet plotters. There are people who plan and people who fund and people who recruit and people who train and people who actually kill.
I can speculate, of course. In war-torn areas like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine the number is going to be high - they’ve got more reason to fight and less reason to live. In America and Europe there will be some but probably ranging from a few dozen to a few hundred at most, often young radicalized converts too angry and naive to have any perspective on what they’re doing. The graph linked in the post before yours is probably in the right ballpark, but who knows? No one denies that they’re there, or that they pose a very real threat. The challenge for us, as I keep saying, is not to assume that it’s the “Islam” in “radical Islam” that causes this and tar all Muslims everywhere with the same brush; it’s the “radical” we have to monitor.
Islam is the predominant medium for violent crazy at the moment but other religions and other causes have and continue to serve as well. These days we look at people with swarthy skin and beards suspiciously; it used to be that a Northern Irish accent could get you on a watchlist (although not so much in the US - the IRA knew which side their bread was buttered on). Extremist environmental and animal rights groups continue to promote their causes who violent destruction.
It’s a dangerous world full of crazy people. Let’s not make it worse by making the sane ones crazy too.
In 2006, a survey of British Muslims revealed that 23% (370,000) of the Muslims living there thought that the attack there that killed 54 innocent people was justified. Article here.
One can see some numbers in the chart here. While those who think the killing of innocents in the U.S. is okay is small, the numbers are not.
There was a cite used here a while back that, if I recall correctly, revealed that 28% of Muslims believed that the killing of innocents was or could be justified. Or something like that.
The good and bad new is the number of Muslims in the world. It’s good that there are so many who oppose such murderous barbarism, like the rest of the civilized world. But even a small percentage who insist on murderous barbarism means that the numbers are in the tens or hundreds of millions.
You do realize that McCarthy was correct, right. There were, in fact, Communists in the government. That’s fodder for another thread, but in case you’re interested, here.
Interestingly, we still outright won the Cold War, even with McCarthy discredited and no out-of-the-ordinary actions taken to deal with the so-called “Communist Menace”.
So I’m confused what lesson we’re supposed to take away from this–we could have somehow “won the Cold War” back in the 1960s if we’d have all listened? Or, perhaps, “our democracy is robust enough to protect itself from ‘infiltrators’ even without special effort.”
So good to hear you’ve been protesting the entirety of the Iraq War, which has to date caused absolutely **no fewer than 97,994 civilian deaths, and believe it has no justification whatsoever. (Cite.)
There’s a quote that I can’t quite remember…something about the messenger. Hmmm.
Now if you’d like to refute the facts in M. Stanton Evans’s book, by all means… But why attempt to be on point when you can attempt to discredit the site that did an interview with the author? I think we both know the answer, don’t we, hon?
So, you concede that McCarthy was right? Good. That’s progress.
Now, whether you think it wise that a country should turn a blind eye to threats and hope for the best is a good defense policy is another matter. Perhaps you should run for office on such an intelligent and responsible defense policy.