While we do agree in principle, there is a major problem, and a very dangerous component of your statement. Choosing a date and saying that there has been only one killing of an abortion physician, while there has been eight killing at abortion clinics by extreme Christian fundamentalists and over 17 attempted murders in the last 15 years seriously downplays the largest active terrorism threat in America next to Muslim terrorism, extremist Right Wing militias, and White Supremacist groups.
I'm trying to compare apples and apples.
The reason I chose 9/12 is because, if I had gone back before, I would have had to include 9/11. 9/11 is obviously not only a statistical outlier but something organized outside the US and orchestrated by people who were not permanent residents of the US. So it is obviously more complicated than simply "Islamic terrorism" and may have political factors involved, many of which have been presented.
I could have picked another time frame, such as the 1990s, but first, a lot of people would consider that too old to be particularly relevant, and second, 9/12 is when the accusations of huge amounts of Islamophobia in the US really got going.
So I concentrate on a limited time, 9/12 to the present, with a limited population, citizens of the US, and crimes committed within the US, during a period when there haven't been any supreme statistical outliers. I'm also limiting it to actual killings between people of different religious groups that can reasonably be judged to be reiigiously motivated in significant part, with a particular concern to how groups like CAIR would judge something a hate murder if the victim were Muslim.
So, yes, I have excluded Right Wing Christian militia groups and Christian White Supremacist groups, unless someone actually killed somebody. I've also excluded acts of vandalism, assault, and even attempted murders. The thing is that I've done this for
everybody, not just Christians. I've done it for Muslims, atheists, Jews, Sikhs, and any other religious or non-religious group you could name. In that process, I've had to exclude
a lot of acts of aggression by Muslims. Just as one example of many, I excluded one case where a Muslim shot a Jew in the back six times, because I could not confirm that the guy died. I've also excluded the several "honor killings" because they were not obviously between people of different religions.
You seem to be impatient with that. You want to take a group, say Christians, and count up all the murders and attempted murders and threats and attitudes and so on. You can do that, if you like, but I am not doing this. One reason I am not doing this is that there are plenty of groups who do exactly the same thing about Muslims. They have been accused of special pleading in order to put down Islam, and I quite agree with the criticism. So I'm not doing that for
any group, and I'm only looking for the most severe crime, murder. (Which is what Chomsky alleges, so it's relevant to this thread). This is because it is much more difficult to compare instances of special pleading, and the strength of the special pleading is persuasive, so the data get hidden.
Now, it is almost impossible to be completely fair. There are a lot of cases that should obviously be excluded (BTW, I excluded far more cases of Muslim aggression than of any other group), and there are a lot of cases that clearly should be included. In the few cases that were on the cusp, I made the decision to include based on generosity to Muslims, that is, what decision would make Muslims seem as peace-loving as possible, and other groups as violent as possible, given the data. I also applied this to other ambiguous estimates. So I took the largest estimate for the number of Muslims in the US I could find (7 million from CAIR) and the smallest estimate of the number of Christians (200 million, lower than the estimates I've seen).
Doing that, I get the following (these are preliminary numbers).
1 Christian hate killing of an abortion doctor
1 Christian hate killing of a Muslim
1 Christian hate killing of a Sikh
1 Christian hate killing of an Egyptian Copt
1 Christian hate killing of an Egyptian Christian (other, but I'm being generous)
35 Muslim hate killings of non-Muslims (mostly Jews)
Note: I only counted the 10 beltway murders, not the 3 the same people killed in Louisiana, because they were not as clearly linked to the principal perpetrator's writings about Jihad. Also, since this is a preliminary count, the number 35 could be as low as 30 or as high as 40, but with not much variance beyond that.
At a very minimum, these findings refute the idea that Islamophobia is rampant in the US, at least out of proportion to other hate motivations, such as
Judenhass amongst Muslims. For all we know, vast numbers of Americans bear secret grudges against Muslims, but as far as hatred that is strong enough to kill, Muslims are winning clearly in terms of absolute numbers, and certainly in terms of killings
per capita (5 out of 200 million versus 35 out of 7 million; you can do the math.)
It would be extremely hard to fudge this to support the idea that unwarranted Islamophobia is a particular epidemic, which is probably why polemic and dazzling with bovine fecal matter are so popular. What has actually happened does not support the idea that non-Muslim Americans are, relatively, so hugely murderous of Muslims.
But, talk about Christian killers of abortion doctors, put in a history of the KKK, talk about the Inquisition and the Crusades, Christian missionaries in Africa, and maybe you've got something. I am not accusing you of doing this, but I've seen it a lot, and when it happens, all we get is a shouting match between those people and people who do the same thing on "the other side."
, nope, still wrong. If Huckabee/Palin/Bachman got into office we would have a lot more problems than our policy on torture which is why it has no chance of happening. So we're going to neuter ourselves just in case the next person might abuse their power? Nope fallacies from every angle.
