Well I guess this is the biggest unfounded claim going around after Paris. It’s not fair to muslims and more specifically it’s dangerous and calls for a response which will only make the problem worse.
The danger is not just the threat of going to war again for revenge. It’s unfairly tarring muslims as terrorists, isolating them from western society and preventing them from getting the help they desperately need. Long term, this bitter divisiveness is a making the world unsafer – not safer.
Is Islam a violent religion?
Like any Islam is a religion which has a lot of contradictory stuff in it. Are there jihadist scriptures? Yes. But Islam is not practiced that way any more than the christians follow the bible’s call to violence against non-believers.
If your own full brother, or your son or daughter, or your beloved wife, or you intimate friend, entices you secretly to serve other gods, whom you and your fathers have not known, gods of any other nations, near at hand or far away, from one end of the earth to the other: do not yield to him or listen to him, nor look with pity upon him, to spare or shield him, but kill him. Your hand shall be the first raised to slay him; the rest of the people shall join in with you. Deuteronomy 13:7-12
Here is a nice summary which compares the violence of the Quran to the Bible.
Are Muslims violent people?
First some simple analysis from a facebook post which says no:
There are 6,000,000 Muslims living in France. If just 10% were radical jihadist, then there would be 600,000 attackers. If only 1% were radical jihadist, 60,000 would be attacking Paris. If ONE TENTH OF ONE PERCENT were radical jihadists, that would be 6,000 terrorists. This wasn’t a Muslim ‘terrorist’ attack, this was a handful of psychopaths using religion as an excuse.
Next here are some chilling statistics from Juan Cole:
Juan’s summary quote
It takes a peculiar sort of blindness to see Christians of European heritage as “nice” and Muslims and inherently violent, given the twentieth century death toll I mentioned above. Human beings are human beings and the species is too young and too interconnected to have differentiated much from group to group. People resort to violence out of ambition or grievance, and the more powerful they are, the more violence they seem to commit. The good news is that the number of wars is declining over time, and World War II, the biggest charnel house in history, hasn’t been repeated.
I think in fact, Juan’s got it correct, when he calls out ISIS as a modern pirate/raiding state rather than a return to the muslim caliphate.
Here is an excellent analysis from Graeme Wood which I find really illuminating. ISIS is a literal return to a medieval caliphate.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/
Will allowing Syrian refugees into the US spawn terrorism?
All of this lead to the regrettable posturing against taking in Syrian refugees. This is particularly cruel because these are the very people who are being hurt by ISIS brutality. The facts are, the likelihood of islamic immigrants committing terrorist acts in their adopted countries is particularly low.
Lets look at some facts:
Terror attacks are not particularly islamic in the EU from Wikipedia, (but they are more deadly)
More statistics from Interpol
Add to this the fact that refugees are particularly uninvolved is terror. According to Stephen Bauman, the president and CEO of World Relief, (one of nine national agencies authorized by the U.S. State Department to resettle refugees in the United States)
“if you look at the 35 years of refugee resettlement in our nation, over three million since the mid to late 70s, and there has been no one from that group of people that are terrorists or have carried out a terrorist attack.
Democratic response
Barak Obama knows what is going on here
“When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted … that’s shameful,” said Obama in a Monday press conference in Turkey. “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”
“I think it is very important for us right now — particularly those who are in leadership, particularly those who have a platform and can be heard — not to fall into that trap, not to feed that dark impulse inside of us,” Obama added.
Or consider this surprisingly rational rejection of tarring muslims with the terror label from the recent democratic debate
DICKERSON: Just to interrupt. He didn’t say all Muslims. He just said radical Islam. Is that a phrase you don’t…
CLINTON: I think THAT you can talk about Islamists who clearly are also jihadists, but I think it’s not particularly helpful to make the case that Senator Sanders was just making that I agree with, that we’ve got to reach out to Muslim countries.
We’ve got to have them be part of our coalition. If they hear people running for president who basically shortcut it to say we are somehow against Islam, that was one of the real contributions, despite all the other problems, thatGeorge W. Bush made after 9/11 when he basically said after going to a Mosque in Washington, we are not at war with Islam or Muslims.
We are at war with violent extremism. We are at war with people who use their religion for purposes of power and oppression. And, yes, we are at war with those people. But I don’t want us to be painting with too broad a brush.
…
DICKERSON: Just quickly, do either of you, radical Islam, do either of you use that phrase?
SANDERS: I don’t think the term is what’s important. What is important to understand is we have organizations, whether it is ISIS or Al Qaida, who do believe we should go back several thousand years. We should make women third-class citizens, that we should allow children to be sexually assaulted, that they are a danger to modern society.
…
O’ MALLEY: I believe calling it what it is, is to say radical jihadis. That’s calling it what it is. But John, let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that all of our Muslim American neighbors in this country are somehow our enemies here. They are our first line of defense.
And we are going to be able to defeat ISIS on the ground there, as well as in this world, because of the Muslim Americans in our country and throughout the world who understand that this brutal and barbaric group is perverting the name of a great world religion. And now, like never before, we need our Muslim American neighbors to stand up and to — and to be a part of this.
GOP response
In light of the reality regarding islamic terror, lets look at some quotes from the GOP. They are really going off the rails on this –
Donald Trump – how is this even true in his world?
Three days after Islamic State terrorists attacked Paris in a series of coordinated shootings and bombings, Trump lambasted German Chancellor Angela Merkel for accepting Syrian refugees. “I think what she did to Germany is a disgrace,” he said, adding that those same refugees “have destroyed all of Europe.”
“Is this a Trojan horse?” Trump said he asked his wife of the plans for Syrian refugees to enter into the United States.
Marco Rubio
The bottom line is that this is not just a threat coming from abroad. What we need to open up to and realize is that we have a threat here at home — home-grown violent extremists. Individuals who perhaps have not even traveled abroad, who had been radicalized online. This has become a multi-faceted threat. In the case of what’s happening in Europe, this is a swarm of refugees, and as I’ve said repeatedly over the last few months, you can have 1,000 people come in, and 999 of them are just poor people fleeing oppression and violence, but one of them is an ISIS fighter. If that’s the case, you have a problem, and there is no way to vet that out. There is no background check system in the world that allows us to find that out, because who do you call in Syria to background check them?
Read more at http://redalertpolitics.com/2015/11/16/rubio-cant-take-syrian-refugees-impossible-real-screenings/#KSIiQtSbErTi42Cx.99
Ben Carson
‘While many of us were troubled by the President’s decision at the time, given the events in Paris Friday night, there can be no disputing the fact that the United States cannot, should not, and must not accept any Syrian refugees, let alone the dramatically larger number President Obama volunteered to host,’ Carson said
Ted Cruz from the New Yorker
President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s idea that we should bring tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees to America—it is nothing less than lunacy…
Cruz spoke even more openly about those whom he considers to be the good people in the world. He told reporters that we should accept Christians from Syria, and only Christians, because, he said, “There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror.”
GOP governors are piling from CNN
More than half the nation’s governors say they oppose letting Syrian refugees into their states, although the final say on this contentious immigration issue will fall to the federal government.
States protesting the admission of refugees range from Alabama and Georgia, to Texas and Arizona, to Michigan and Illinois, to Maine and New Hampshire. Among these 31 states, all but one have Republican governors.
argh…
I think Bernie has the right take on it:
Bernie Sanders “Disturbed” by GOP Response to Paris Attacks
Or consider Elizabeth Warren’s observation
“[Syrians are] terrified that the world will turn its back on them and their children. Some politicians have already moved in that direction, proposing to close our country to people fleeing the massacre in Syria,” Warren said. “That is not a real plan to keep us safe.”
Election Diary 