Thursday 5 May 2011

Lies, damned lies, and taqiyya

In the run-up to the recent hearings by Senator Peter King on radicalisation of the Islamic community in the US, there were many claims made that terrorism is not the sole province of Islam.  That there are terrorists in every religion and that therefore Islam should not be singled out for attention. That's true.  In a technical sense.  In the same sense, that, say a glass of water and the Atlantic are both bodies of water; or that shoplifting and serial murder are both crimes.  The obvious point being that there's a difference of scale.  The 16,000+ documented acts of terror since 911, done in the name of Islam, simply dwarf the count-on-the-fingers-of-one-hand number of terrorist acts done in the name of Christianity, or Buddhism, or by Jews, let alone those done by "eco-terrorists".
A fellow called Arsalan Bukhari has got his knickers in a twist over the laudable Raymond Ibrahim's talk at an EvCC event.
He quotes an FBI report to the effect that only 6% of terror attacks were committed in the name of Islam.  It happens that I looked at this report in some detail a while back and so made a comment on the site which brought this guy to my attention.
Post herewith:

Regarding Bukhari's claim:
In fact, a 2005 FBI report on terrorism shows that between 1980 and 2005, only 6 percent of U.S. terror attacks were committed in the name of Islam.
This is subject to the "fallacy of range" -- that is, selectively choose the range of your data, and you can prove almost anything. In this case, the further back you go in time (here to 1980), the less the percentage of today's Islamic terrorist acts are going to be. If you look at the relevant period -- now and the recent past --the overwhelming percentage of deadly terrorist attacks (94% by my count) are Islamic. In other words, the statement above would be correct if you added the word "not" between "were" and "committed". The truth turned on its head. The lie of statistics, in a perfect example of taqiyya.
I cover this in more detail here