Thursday 22 October 2009

"An(other) inconvenient truth"

History News Network carries a story  reporting on a recent "National Intelligence Strategy of the United States of America" which includes a breakdown of terrorist organisations worldwide.
The U.S. State Department has a list of 45 “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” Of those, 25 are Islamic-based organizations; 11 are secular nationalist; 7 are Marxist or Maoist; and only two are religious-based but not Muslim: the Jewish extremist Kahane Chai, and the pseudo-Shinto Aum Shinrikyo of Japan.
Now this is curious.  My own quick and dirty estimate of terrorist organisations comes up with 138 of which 112 are still active.  Of these 79% are Islamic.  Of those that are purely religiously-based only (ie not including Nationalist, Communist, Anarchist, Tamil or Other), Islamic terrorist organisations are 89 out of 90, or 99%.  That is, of those terrorist organisations around the world which are religiously-based, all but one is Islamic.  (if we add in the "extremist Kahane Chai" mentioned above that's 89/91 or 98%).


Sure, my estimates are just based on on-line sources, with none of the resources available to the Director of National Intelligence, but still...  I get 67 more terrorist organisations than the US State Department.  What's going on??


You can see my figures here .  (I did this around August this year, on an arvo with nothing else to do...)