In one of the most influential works of social science penned in the late 20 th century, Samuel Huntington claimed that Muslim societies are “bloody.” He asserted that they experience more major intrastate political violence, meaning civil wars, rebellions, interethnic clashes, and sustained government repression. ![]() Things get even more interesting when we look at other ways that people kill each other besides terrorism. Three million Muslims live in the United States, and odds of an American being crushed to death by their own furniture or television exceed those of being killed by an Islamist. The attacks on Charlie Hebdo were well-planned, but any cretin acting alone can throw a homemade bomb into a crowded café-or walk into a classroom and open fire. These facts are all the more remarkable given how easy it is to be a terrorist. That means the risk of an American being killed by any act of terrorism in a given year is roughly one in 3.5 million, and the chances are that the act of terrorism won’t be committed by an Islamist. They were ghastly and dramatic, just as they were intended to be. Only four of the 125 attacks happened in the Western Hemisphere or Europe. Another 40 attacks took place in just three countries-Israel, India, and the Philippines. Of the 125 attacks committed by Islamists that I studied, 77-62 percent-of them were committed in predominantly Muslim countries, and their victims were overwhelmingly other Muslims. Look more closely, though, and you’ll see they don’t attack in the West very often. However, Islamists do commit most of the terrorism globally these days. In the United States, law enforcement considers the “sovereign citizens movement” to be a greater threat than Islamist terrorists. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and Colombia’s “narcoterrorists” blow up civilians and have nothing to do with Islam. Even now, Islamists are by no means the sole perpetrators. Rewind fifty or a hundred years and it was communists, anarchists, fascists, and others who thought than any means justified their glorious ends. So, all that would seem to suggest Islam is more violent, right? In other words, even when we define both “terrorism” and “Islamist” restrictively, thereby limiting the number of incidents and casualties that can be blamed on Islamists, Islamists come out as the prime culprits. I also use a restrictive definition of “Islamist” and classify attacks by Chechen separatists as ethnonational rather than Islamist terrorism. I exclude from the data all terrorist incidents that occurred in Iraq after the American invasion, and I consider attacks on occupying military forces anywhere to be guerilla resistance, not terrorism. The headlines in the past months have been full of Islamist-fueled violence, such as ISIS killing its hostages, the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, and yesterday’s attack on a Copenhagen café.Īnd a cursory look at the data shows that from 1994-2008, I found that 204 high-casualty terrorist bombings occurred worldwide and that Islamists were responsible for 125, or 61 percent, of these incidents, accounting for 70 percent of all deaths. And indeed, global terrorism today is disproportionately an Islamist phenomenon, as I show in my recent book. There is a widely held belief in the United States today that Islam is a religion that goads its followers to violence.
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