In 2010 I put together an excel sheet of all the officially designated terrorist organisations in the world and calculated how many were Islamic. At that time it was 98%.
In August 2015 I updated the sheet and these were the headline figures:
At the risk of belabouring the obvious, a few observations:
In August 2015 I updated the sheet and these were the headline figures:
- Total: 127 (141 on Wikipedia, but I removed the ones no longer active)
- Total religiously-based: 89 (77% of total)
- Islamic as % of Total: 72%
- Islamic as % of religiously-based: 93.3%
- Total: 157 (176 Wikipedia page, inactive removed)
- Total religiously-based: 124 (79% of total)
- Islamic as % of Total: 75%
- Islamic as % of religiously-based: 94.4%
- Terrorism organisation numbers are up, with religiously-based organisations up even more as a proportion of the total.
- Islamic terrorist groups are the large majority of all terrorist groups. Of the religiously-based ones, Islamic terrorist groups are the overwhelming proportion. (93% to 98%).
- In short: the percentage of Islamic terrorist groups varies from "virtually all" to "pretty much virtually all".
- Therefore: it's patent nonsense for Islamic apologists to claim (as the do), that "all religions have their terrorists". Not even close, not even for the Abrahamic religions.
- The number of participants and supporters of Islamic terrorist groups number in the hundreds of millions. Supporters of just one of the groups above, ISIL, number up to 70 million.
- It's nonsense to say that the number of Islamic terrorists are "a tiny minority" let alone that "99.9% of Muslims are peace loving", as Obama has said. The numbers joining these terrorist groups, or supporting their actions, are a minority, to be sure, but a very substantial minority. For a religion with 1.5 billion adherents, that's a serious worry.
