They were less likely to conduct a terrorist attack, successful or not, than a random person from the population in a time frame that you chose.
Which neatly torpedoes your assertion that Muslims are more likely to be terrorists than the general population.
And I didn't choose the time period, Europol did.
If we remove a known confounder that we know inspires a majority of terrorism in EU, but can't inspire Jihadi terrorism in EU - separatism
"Separatist terrorism" isn't a confounder, it's a descriptor. Just like "jihadist terrorism" is a descriptor. And Europol's list of all the terrorist attacks in the EU includes both types of terrorist attacks because Europol is not measuring simply
separatist terror, but all terrorist attacks from
all sources.
If the only way you can make your argument work is to dismiss all the non-jihadist terror attacks in Europol's list of terror attacks as irrelevant for the purely tautological reason that they're not jihadist, then your argument is fatally flawed.
I asked you before, and you ignored it - why not pick another group? Why are the majority (not all) Muslims who live in EU or USA the yardstick by which we should judge Islam? Why not use, say ... Pakistanis who support ISIS instead?
A) When talking about Islamic terror in the West, the natural focus of the conversation is Muslims in the West, B) if Islam itself were actually the problem here, there wouldn't
be that difference between the two disparate groups of Muslims in the first place, C) Pakistan is a dramatic outlier even among other Muslim-majority nations when it comes to ISIS, and D) Attitudes toward ISIS don't appear to be strictly correlated with religion, since in Malaysia only 67% of Muslims have an unfavorable view of ISIS but so do only 65% of Buddhists, in Burkina Faso only 64% of Muslims have an unfavorable view of ISIS but only 66% of Christians do too, while in Lebanon the unfavorability of ISIS among Christians, Shias, and Sunnis is 100%, 100%, and 98%, respectively.
I've red an analysis some time ago that what we see today with Islam is an equivalent of the Reformation in Christianity. To a large extent the Reformation was about a return to the scriptures, practicing religion in accordance with the teachings and examples set in the Bible, by Jesus and apostles.
This is exactly what Salafism is all about. Salafis were the companions and immediate successors of Mohamed, the movement is about returning Islam to the way it was practiced by Mohamed and the first four rightly guided Caliphs.
And Salafism bears as much resemblance to the Islam of Muhammad's time as the various violent, radical sects (or even the major denominations) that arose during the Reformation bore to the Christianity of the first century.
There isn't even
one kind of Salafism, with the various Salafist groups differing from each other on some pretty major points, like the validity of
madh'hab.
When it happened with Christianity, it gave us secularism and separation of Church from state and a dramatic drop of importance of religious dogma. When it happened in Islam it gave us Boko Haram and ISIS.
The Reformation most certainly had its Boko Harams and ISIS', and Europe was torn apart by violent religious conflicts for
centuries afterward, with some of those conflicts even lasting until the present day. Either you know as little about the Reformation as you know about Islam, or quadraginta was right and you're applying a double standard again, excoriating Islam for the violence during the "Reformation" you say it's undergoing, while completely whitewashing the violence of the Christian Reformation.
That tells us that there is a disconnect between Islamic teachings and a majority of Muslims, and ... pretty much shows why my insistence on not judging Islam solely on what a majority of Muslims think Islam means is really, really appropriate.
"Islam" doesn't exist as some kind of separate entity outside the actions and beliefs of Muslims.
And that's another double standard, I see: Islam is to be judged not by what Muslims believe but by what you think its scriptures say, but everything bad that Christian scriptures say can be handwaved away because Christians don't believe that these days.
) to use the behavior of Seventeenth Century religious cultures as an area of discussion. He and people of his weird fixation have always tried to dodge that bullet. Usually with the 'Well, we aren't like that any more. Let's not talk about what we did before.
