Where are all the militant Muslims?

Great Debates
#1

I’ve been saying this for years, but the Aurora shootings bring it up again.

I have been assured by experts like George W. Bush and Michelle Bachmann that there are millions of militant Muslims who hate us for our freedom. People living in Glenn Beckistan think that almost all Muslims are like that; more responsible and informed analysts, as seen on Fox News, might put the percentage as low as 10% of Muslims.

With about 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, 10% of that is 160 million. If only 1% of those freedom-hating Muslims has the desire and means to come to the US, that makes 1.6 million willing and able to attack US citizens on our soil.

It’s not hard for a foreigner to legally visit the US as a tourist. It’s not hard for a tourist to remain longer than he is authorized. And according to the same people on Fox News, it’s also ridiculously easy for a foreigner to illegally enter the US and evade authorities indefinitely, even as he gets free tuition and medical care (but I’m not sure they are right about that last part). And according to everyone, it’s pretty easy to get guns and ammo in the US, especially at gun shows.

So where are these 1.6 million militant Muslims, who want to kill Americans, and who have the ability to do it? It might take a lot of planning and coordination to pull off another WTC style incident, but as anyone should have known, and as Aurora proved yet again, it would be ridiculously easy to shoot up a mall, bus, subway train, restaurant, or movie theater. Ridiculously easy to have an Aurora-type incident every day, day after day, for 1.6 million days. Which is 4,380 years. By which time even more militant Muslims may have been born.

And if they only wanted to do it for a thousand years, they could have four of five Auroras every day. If they only wanted to do it for a hundred years, they could stage 40 or 50 shootings, maybe one in every state, every day.

And THAT is if they are willing to die when they do it. If instead of shooting people until they themselves are captured or killed, they decide to just leave homemade bombs in the aforementioned bus, subway, restaurant, mall, or theater, then the same person can do it over and over again, and be long gone when it goes off. And not even a hairy-chested patriot packing heat can do much about it.

Which means we could have 1.6 million bombings per day. The only way to stop them would be to search everyone who goes anywhere in public, several times a day. Freedom destroyed, mission accomplished.

And it would be SO EASY to achieve. If they used bombs instead of guns, so that one person could leave several bombs around per day as he randomly drove from city to city, not even caring how many people he killed with each bomb, then just a DOZEN people could completely disrupt US society, and it might take months or years to catch them. If they were careful, they might never be caught. And on their drives between large cities, they could stop along the way to poison reservoirs, or start forest fires, or damage train tracks, or whatever.

Just a dozen bombers could bring the US to its knees if they struck at random locations in the US every day. After a week or so, when they had hit all 50 states, people all over the country would be afraid to go out, go shopping, go to work on mass transit, even buy gas (the Beltway Snipers, two nuts with one rifle, disrupted parts of two states and DC for several weeks a few years ago, when they targeted gas stations). The economy, especially in its current fragile state, would tank. It would be absolute chaos. It would be exactly what the America-hating, freedom-hating militant Muslims would want.

And yet, we only have Aurora-type incidents once every few years, and they are not perpetrated by al Qaeda or the Islamic Brotherhood. They are almost always just random nutcases – which shows how easy it is to do.

You know what I think? I think that the number of people who hate the US for our freedom, as opposed to, say, our foreign policy, is very small, and that the number who hate us enough to actually want to come to America to kill innocent civilians just because they are Americans is very, very, very small. There may be a few nuts in a cave somewhere, but they are disorganized and ineffective. I think the reason we have not been attacked since 9-11 is not because our borders are impenetrable, or Bush is so manly that they fear to attack us as long as he lives; rather, it is because there are only a very few people who want to attack us, and they don’t have the means to do it.

They don’t even have a dozen people willing and able to do it.

What do you think?

#2

They’re busy… See Iraq, Yemen, Mauritania, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc… I’m sure they’ll get back to you in due time.

#3

Watch this:

#4

There is no place for rational analysis when running a multi-trillion operation.

You think that after 10 years of the most sophisticated propaganda machinery in the World people will read your analysis and simply switch.

We are in a paradigm, a framework, a system of thought that makes conclusions as automatic as possible as the paradigm does not need thinking. If it has a “hallmark” of something, then it probably is something.

Oh, yeah, and they are busy because if we don’t fight them over there, we’d be fighting them over here. And chatter. OMG! the chatter is increasing.

And that former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, he is such a liar when he claims “al-Qaeda and Bin Laden were “a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies”, and that "Al-Qaida, literally ‘the database’, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.”

Seriously, you cannot win in a debate about terrorism because with every passing day a person obsessed with it will claim that we got lucky this time but there’s always next day. They will acknowledge everything you said with no dispute whatsoever. You simply cannot win an argument with them because it’s like debating religious people – it comes down to fact vs. faith. They have a strong belief that sometime in a near future – tomorrow or in a week, a month perhaps or even a year, something will happen and it will have all the “hallmarks” and then they will be vindicated for all their delusions. They used to put people like that in an institution. But only if they become like that randomly; when they get like that under influence of their own Government they are referred to as public opinion.

#5

Well, according to my right-wing reading they’re already here, but either they’re somewhat cowardly, they’re sleeper agents with a very long-term agenda, or a bit of both.

#6

The number of Muslims who “hate us for our freedom” is zero. No Muslim has ever said, “you know, those Americans are just too fucking free!” The only people who actually hate our freedoms are Jerry Falwell types.

However, the fact that Michelle Bachmann is clinically insane and/or stupid doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of militant Muslims intent on attacking the US. Did you forget this guy? This guy? This guy? How about this guy? You probably didn’t hear about this guy or this guy, but they count, right? They’re not all random nutcases.

#7

I’ve made many of these same points for years. With the huge number of Muslims in the world, if they really were all out to get us, we’d know. Or, they’re just incredibly bad at it.

The same thing goes for simply unstable people who go around shooting up movie theaters. There really aren’t that many of them who have both the inclination and ability to pull it off. This is a big part of why I don’t live my life in fear.

#8

I’ve read articles from Stratfor about this issue, and related things. There are several segments to this issue. Here’s a brief summary.

#1–As other posters have noted, most radical Muslims are in other countries. Even in terms of home-grown extremists, a lot of countries have more problems than we do. The “melting pot” is still at work.

#2–Since the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, most radicals (of any stripe) go for big, flashy, fear-inducing plots that are actually far less effective at hurting and killing people than plain old guns. Witness the 1995 sarin attempt in Japan, for example.

#3–It’s somewhat harder to build an effective bomb and survive the attempt than a lot of people think. Anybody who wants to be an effective serial bomber has to find somebody able and willing to train him. That act opens him up to the possibility of being arrested. If he goes it alone, which has a much lower risk of being arrested, he runs a much higher risk of being blown up by his attempts at self-guided learning.

#4–American police, customs agents, etc. tend to be better trained and equipped than their counterparts in third-world countries. While this is perhaps a minor point, there are some situations where this makes a big difference.

#9

What movie is that from? It reminds me of an ad for one of the oil companies that was running fairly often a few months ago, where some hippie commie woman student is talking about how bad fossil fuels are, and somebody says, “Actually, natural gas is very efficient” or something along those lines, and instantly converts her.

#10

Whenever Bush would talk about how we were keeping terrorists out of America by fighting them in Iraq, I always thought of the scene in Blazing Saddles, where they put a toll booth in the middle of the desert, and everybody lined up to pay the toll instead of just going around it.

#11

People in the Middle East have a culture of hospitality and friendliness to guests. Sometimes I imagine a group of men building a bomb and ranting about the Great Satan when a car full of American tourists drives up and knocks on the door to ask for directions:

“Please, please come in and sit down. Can we get you some tea?”

“No, thanks, we are just trying to find Kartoum”.

“Sit, sit, we insist. Here is some tea and dates. Have you eaten?”

“Yes, we just had some McDonalds at the Oasis.”

“That is not enough to sustain you. I am afraid we have only very meager food for such esteemed guests. Please wait while we kill a lamb and roast it. Are you from Cleveland by any chance my friend? I have a cousin, Ahmed, in Cleveland.”

And so on for several hours until they send off the tourists fed, happy, and with a picnic basket. Then they go back to building the bomb.

If we could all just put a face on our “enemies” then maybe we could just get along.

#12

Are you suggesting that someone comes to the shore of US of A determined to do some damage for whatever and they get prevented by… melting pot dynamic of American society?

Sarin attack in Japan is exactly what OP is pointing out. It’s very easy to do yet it hasn’t been done.

Um, they are supposed to be “suicide bombers” where survival is not an option. And, again, as per OP, the flashiest method of all hasn’t been used yet.

A minor point making a big difference? Nicely put. I have no counter point on this one.

#13

Ok, this story just caused my BS detector to start pinging like crazy. This sounds like some truther conspiracy theory and not a particularly well-thought out one.

“Al-Quaeda” does not mean “the database”, I have never heard it translated as such and translating it as such would make no sense. “Al-Qaeda” is often translated as “the base” because it refers to the foundation upon which a building is built.

That’s why Arabic translations of Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead are both called “Al Quaeda”(people who don’t like libertarians can start chuckling).

Newcomer, I think you were fed a preposterous story by a fairly unreliable source.

#14

You should re-calibrate.

#15

I did not realize Robin Cook spoke Arabic.

His claim that Al-Quaeda means “the database” and references a computer file is bullshit.

Al-Quaeda refers to the base upon which buildings are built on.

That’s why the Arabic translation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead are both entitled Al-Quaeda.

If you don’t believe me, check with some Arab linguists.

Such a really massive error does little to inspire confidence in said author’s analysis of events and suggests the article was more speculative than concrete.

#16

Now, suddenly, former British Foreign Secretary is not sufficient.

Things you read here sometimes makes my skin crawl.

However, may I suspect you don’t like what he’s saying and are simply making ad hominem?

/* question rhetorical; doe not require response

#17

How about former US Vice President saying Iraq had WMDs?

The idea that Al-Quaeda means database is simply incorrect.

#18

I love how you make an appeal to authority and then turn around and accuse someone else of fallacious reasoning (and wrongly besides, but you’re hardly the first to use “ad hominem” to mean “insult”).

Anyway, the notions that قاعدة means “radical” and “database” are both plausible, but you quoting Cook is the only time I’ve ever heard the latter translation (and Wiktionary doesn’t list it).

#19

Are you seriously trying to argue that “Al-Quaeda” means “the database” as in a computer database?

It doesn’t. As I said it refers to the foundation on which a building is constructed and hence can be translated as “the foundation”, “the fountainhead” or “the base” but I’ve never heard it translated “the database” nor would any Arab do so.

Do you know some Arab linguists who’ve told you something different?

#20

Actually, while his linguistic skills are pretty poor, if one ignores the silly “database” error, the rest of that paragraph is pretty accurate.

bin Laden was the product of the CIA, (and the Reagan and Bush administrations), sending weapons to Afghanistan and tending to favor the most extreme Islamists for their largesse, (on the grounds that the Islamists were going to be the fiercest opponents of the Soviets).

There are probably other factors regarding bin Laden, (such as the U.S. support of the Saudi royal family who offended bin Laden with their hedonistic lifestyles), but the selection of the most extreme Islamists for aid in Afghanistan led directly to the rise of the Taliban in that country as they were the ones who survived the Soviet incursion with the most weapons.