I’m Not Emeril’s Religion Of Peace, Part 2

18 January, 2007. 520 words.

For those that missed it, Alton Foley (“I’m Not Emeril”) left a comment responding to I’m Not Emeril’s Religion Of Peace on my creaky old home page last night. My response follows his comment.

If we were not attacked on 9/11 by “extremists who acted in the name of the Islamic religion” then please tell me who did perpetrate that action. If they truly represented the Islamic religion, I would agree with you that Virgil did, in fact condemn the religion. But Virgil clearly said they were “extremists who acted in the name of the Islamic religion”.

Then you decide to get into numbers. OK, I’m an engineer, and have a passing acquaintance with numbers. You decided that only 1% hold the values that Mr. Goode referred to as “extremists who acted in the name of the Islamic religion.” I’ll accept your estimate, even though it’s been represented as a higher percentage elsewhere.

You next say that there are 6 million American Muslims, a number that you admi t is based on the high end of various estimates. Let’s be way more than generous and cut you number in half. 3 million American Muslims. Sound fair so far?

Using your 1% estimate for those that are “extremists who [are acting] in the name of the Islamic religion” gives us 30,000 “extremists who [are acting] in the name of the Islamic religion.”

30,000. Thirty thousand, which you consider to not be “many”. it took 19 to perpetrate 9/11. Yet thirty thousand is not “many”.

I give up. Your head is so seriously in the sand I won’t even bother to define “a certain percentage”.

Alton Foley (I’m Not Emeril), Wednesday, Jan 17, 2007, 9:42 PM

I never said we weren’t attacked by “extremists who acted in the name of the Islamic religion.” My point was and still is that we (and Virgil Goode) should be focusing homeland security efforts more on the “extremist” part than the “Islamic religion” part.

My other point continues to be that some people’s reactions to the threat of terrorism in the U.S. doesn’t make sense (outside of their political ramifications, that is). I’m not saying there’s no threat; I’m just saying the threat level doesn’t seem much different than anything else that might kill us (yes, even after 9/11). Sure jihadists are waging war on the West, but they don’t have much of an army to fight with.

To illustrate, compare those estimated 30,000 extremists mentioned above with the number of violent crimes and felony convictions (PDF) that occur in the U.S. (It’s a lot more than 30,000.) When I step out of my front door every day, should I be more worried about Muslim jihadists or American criminals? The point here being that death and danger can strike the average American from anywhere, any time, any day, and there’s no compelling reason to think it’s more likely to come from a Muslim than anyone else.

(Updated a couple times to fix the (bleep)ing blockquote formatting on blogger. Sorry.)

Thomas Krehbiel writes The Krehbiel Strikes Back, a generally centrist commentary on news, media, politics, and culture.

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