In a posting sarcastically entitled Great questions of our time, the usually excellent Mick Hartley pours scorn on a book with the question in my title above as its subtitle, without (I’m guessing) him (Mick Hartley) having read any of this book.
I tried to attach the following comment to Hartley’s posting but could not make it work, so here it is, here:
I think this actually is a great question. Given what a totally vile doctrine Islam is, and given how many people say that they follow it, why indeed do so few Muslims, percentage wise, actually do the kinds of murderous things demanded of them in Islam’s holy scriptures?
The more vile you consider the things that Islam demands of its devotees, and they seem to me to be very vile indeed, the better the question is.
I am a regular and grateful reader of your blog. …
… by which I mean Mick Hartley‘s blog.
… I rarely disagree with you (and I greatly enjoy your photos (taken by you and by others)), but I think I do disagree with you on this.
Whether the above-linked-to book actually does supply good answers to this question, I do not know. But it surely is a question well worth asking.
Similarly good questions are: Why are there now so few wars raging these days, compared to how many wars that might now be raging? (Part of the answer to that would help to explain, in particular, all those verbally manic yet strangely well-behaved Muslims.) Why so few car crashes, train crashes, air crashes? And yes, I am well aware that there are a also a great many car crashes, but why not far more, given how many cars there are wizzing about hither and thither? Which are more numerous, I wonder, cars or Muslims? Muslims, I should guess, but it is not a confident guess. (Recent answer for the number of cars in the world.)
See also: Why is gun control not necessary, to prevent armed civilians killing each other in large numbers when mere arguments get heated? Because it seems not to be. Armed civilians actually almost never kill each other for bad, domestic or bar-room type disagreement reasons. They mostly (overwhelmingly so) defend themselves with guns against criminals, for very good reasons. The benefits of civilian gun ownership, in those states of the USA where civilian gun ownership is allowed seem to outweigh the harm that you might think that legalising gun ownership might unleash. Why? Was that predictable? To many, not. Minds are changed with questions and answers of this sort. (I can remember, a long time ago now, my own mind being thus changed.) Gun legalisation is now spreading in the USA.
That latter question, about gun control, has become very pertinent to the matter of how to see off the relatively few Muslims who do decide to become terrorists. Armed police in the numbers we have now can’t be everywhere, and shouldn’t be. Also, it is devilishly difficult to predict exactly which verbally fanatical Muslims are actually going to do something appropriately murderous about it. Muslim nutters make up a dauntingly large group to keep tabs on all the time, and in any case do we want to live in a world where the authorities have all the powers they would like to keep such tabs?
In Europe, the gun control argument doesn’t look like happening for real any time soon. But it is now happening for real in connection with the capital city of the USA, which terrorists are apparently saying is now high on their hit list. Are we soon due a Rand Paul “I told you so” moment?
Clearly you are not counting the many who ‘do the kinds of murderous things demanded of them in Islam’s holy scriptures’in Muslim Countries (including things done by the Governments of those Countries), including but not limited to, taking people’s faces off with cheese wire, flogging, beheading, stoning, amputation, rape, imprisonment without trial, torture, sodomising pre-puberty boys and girls, forced marriages.
Given what a totally vile doctrine Islam is, and given how many people say that they follow it, why indeed do so few Muslims, percentage wise, actually do the kinds of murderous things demanded of them in Islam’s holy scriptures?
Because it’s not easy to kill someone. (I assume.)
Most people aren’t going to murder a stranger in cold blood, no matter what anybody says.
I think even Islam’s architects understood this point – I read somewhere that the Koran spends more time encouraging people to wage jihad by supporting it financially than it does encouraging them to actually engage in violence.
Sidebar: this supports the notion that the Koran is just a bit of 8th century propaganda that’s got out of hand.
1. We’re not just starting an Arab empire here, people, we’re on a mission from God.
2. God demands you fight with us!
3. But if you can’t fight, you can make your cheques payable to…
There are actually a lot of people who do “murderous things”: the problem is, they’re usually done in the name of murderous governments.
To get Islamic terrorism in bulk, it takes proximity to a target (like Israel, which suffers terrorism on a daily basis) or a relatively large amount of cash (like the 9/11 attacks). Europe is in trouble now because they effectively ran a 90% off sale on transportation, giving a lot of creeps cheap proximity to their targets.
You normally don’t get it in local populations (like the US) because assimilation ends up taking its toll on the assholes – they either get in trouble in the short term (arrested for non-terrorist actions) or give up on the idea (“hey, these people are treating me better than my compatriots back in Syria, and I just got promoted at my new job”).
Why are there so few socialist terrorists? After all, being a socialist must be like having the political equivalent of road rage, all the time, at everything and everyone around you, with murder in your heart. Whereas not a few people might f and blind at other motorists who might actually do something annoying, getting out of the car usually produces a return to normality, all is forgotten and most people aren’t aggressive dickheads. Whereas a tiny few carry on grudges and are vicious enough to attack people, and end up putting their foul hatred into action.
Allowing for even the media slant against recently-deceased murderers, there appears to be a theme of ‘dickhead-loser-killer-nutjob’ in a lot of the terrorists we seem to have encountered, and that segment is part of the bellcurve in any group of people. If you are looking for a ‘d-l-k-n’, you will probably find a good overlay with terrorists.
There’s a good reason why there are so few wars – globalisation. Everyone now is dependent on everyone else economically. 70 years ago countries were far more autonomous – able to provide for their populations and war needs from their own resources and factories. Plus banking was pretty basic – most people worked in cash. Now everything is numbers on a computer screen – any country that steps out of line faces its banking system being blacklisted and trashed, and the collapse of its economy. Basically no-one can afford to go to war any more.
To echo what most others here said, most people are not by their nature predators or nihilists, which means that they do value human life – both their own and that of others. Also – and contrary to what Corby possibly meant – even in Israel and the PA, most Arab Muslims are not actively engaged in acts of terrorism.
The same goes for communism when it was big, and for Nazism. None of which is to say that the few predators and nihilists are not capable of causing a great deal of death and misery.
Sorry, I meant ‘Cirby’.
This is true. Another (perhaps more important) reason is the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
“the Koran is just a bit of 8th century propaganda that’s got out of hand.”
Well, that’s just about the best explanation I’ve ever read.
It’s been estimated that the holocaust used roughly 180,000 germans or fewer to round up jews, transport them, commit murders, or to organise all that. That’s fewer germans than there were Jews in germany in 1933. If Merkel spreads 3 million muslims over Germany, the country will be judenrein soon enough. Every jew will live not too far from some group of muslims and every such group will occasionally gossip about the jew, some in a hostile fashion, and every such group will have connections to others, ending in some who are willing to do more than talk. The proportion of those eager to do more than talk need not be higher than the proportion of Germans who did more than just talk in the years after 1933. “The only thing necessary for the victory of evil men is that good men do nothing.” (Edmund Burke). For 3 million muslims (or, probably, a good deal less than that would suffice) to complete Adolf’s work and render Germany judenrein, the good muslims will need to do a bit more than nothing. A widespread habit of unfriendly gossip will be needed, plus that reluctance to report terrorists to the police that is already such a feature of the French “sensible urban zones’ (to offer a bleakly comic English translation).
So I do not find it surprising that few Muslims have actually committed crimes. Percentage-wise, I expect it will remain few. After all, 180,000 is just 1 German in 400 or so. The effective support of most of the rest, sometimes unenthusiastic when they were confronted with the details, sufficed.
Why so few? Supply and demand. As explained above, it doesn’t take that many to achieve the goals. Terrorism is a transitory tactic in a long term war which is won by demographics.
“They have not so much lost their freedom as they have won their enslavement.” – Etienne de la Boetie
“There’s a good reason why there are so few wars – globalisation. Everyone now is dependent on everyone else economically. ‘
read about that argument in articles leading up to ww1..
Why are there so few wars?
Because Europe has been pacified and generally demilitarized since WW2, and divided into groups of vassal states by the two non-European powers that won it.
The various smaller wars fought since 1945 have been at the margins of the former European and Asian empires that collapsed as a result of that conflict. The superpowers were attempting to annex these newly independent areas into their spheres of influence, but carefully avoided any direct conflict due to the obvious dangers of nuclear exchanges, which would have rendered any possible result as a very new definition for “Pyrrhic victory”.
As for terrorism, it requires a group of very fanatical people willing to commit gruesome acts which will very likely result in their deaths. In any general population, the number who are committed to that degree is usually a minority, unless some significant cause arouses that level of devotion in the larger membership.
Hence, the constant worry amongst the chattering class that each new major incident of Islamic terrorism will result in some violent backlash by the non-Islamic majority populations in the west.
As the rise of anti-immigration political movements seem to show, there is a reaction building, but it has not become overtly violent yet, except for limited military responses.
When that changes, and it will, it will signal the end of Islam in the west, and, very possibly, the beginning of the end for Islam as a major world force.
Let’s remember, the Islamic world exists only through the forbearance of the rest of the developed world, which buys its few products instead of simply seizing them, and provides the Islamic world with everything it needs to exist, from food to technology to weapons.
A determined blockade coupled with seizure of the major oil fields and Islam withers like an unwatered house plant.
And that is the dangerous little secret that so much of the endless huffing and puffing is meant to conceal.
Islam was quite keen on murder and forced conversion until the revenue from infidels dried up. So they tolerated them for tax reasons.
Interestingly, ISIS seems to be running into trouble with the management and funding of its caliphate. For some reason they’re getting short of taxpayers and professionals like doctors.
Murder and mayhem is simply not a sustainable industry.
“Why are there now so few wars raging these days, compared to how many wars that might now be raging”
Agriculture. Historically, going back centuries, power and wealth was about agricultural land. You could capture land and get richer. Once you got industrialisation and advances in agriculture, no-one would fight to get land. Not worth the blood and treasure any longer.
If you look at the Middle East (excepting Israel and maybe Egypt) there is little industrialisation. 99% of Iraq’s exports are oil. So, their economy, like medieval England, is largely about getting richer by taking land. That’s why Islam itself isn’t exactly the problem. If they had Christianity, they’d be killing gays because Leviticus says so. Or buying slaves because Leviticus says so. We still have Leviticus in our bibles, but few people in the west support killing gays (but they did hundreds of years ago).
It’s why the Bush/Blair doctrine failed. You can’t plant a seed of democracy in these places. They might have cars and skyscrapers, but they aren’t modern, industrial nations.
Indeed. The Bible can also be used to justify all kinds of atrocities. It has been so for centuries. Moreover, it is important to remember that in the same manner that Christians include the Torah (and its own brand of insight and insanity) into their faith via the Old Testament, Muslims also include the Bible among their holy books. Case and point, Jesus Christ is considered a “messenger of god” in Islam (in short, the belief that Jesus is a prophet is required in Islam).
Brian’s post tiptops over too many disparate issues to bother, but, sure, there are many gun owners that believe that spending 200 bucks at a gun shop turns them into Navy SEALs. Reality, again, proves them wrong, oftentimes dramatically. People that cannot handle themselves without a weapon are no more than a liability with one.
England was not about getting richer by TAKING land – yes some of the time IT WAS, but not MOST of the time.
What England (and Wales) was about was about developing estates – real private ownership (in fact – if not in some interpretations of legal theory).
The problem of the Middle East is that land belongs to THE STATE – oh the rulers may let someone plunder it for private purposes for awhile, but there is no long term development of estates over generations.
That is why there were fewer people under the Ottoman Empire even in the 19th century than there were under the Roman Empire.
By the way – Israel has not broken with this pattern.
There is little private land in Israel – just as there was little privately owned land under the Ottomans.
No one can really “steal land” in the Middle East – because it is mostly not under real private ownership in the first place.
The peasants?
Penny packet size farms can not be developed properly.
And there are no real estate owners.
Why so few? For the same reason why so few Christians give up their possessions to the poor and embrace absolute poverty.
For the same reason why so few patriots of any country willingly pay taxes and enlist in the army.
For the same reason why so few Libertarians pick up guns and fight against opressive state.
As or the question of the post.
Why are more Muslims not terrorists?
The answer is two fold.
Firstly many Muslims are only nominal ones – they are born into the religion and do not care much about it. Although, like unexploded bombs, that can change in a second.
But, more interestingly, whatever Mohammed was, he was NOT some sort of mad dog.
Mohammed was interested in VICTORY – not killing for the sake of killing.
When one is greatly outnumbered, as Muslims still are greatly outnumbered in the West, random killing is stupid. It invites revenge – and the Westerners still have the numbers (if they had to will) to defeat the massively outnumbered enemies in their midst.
Far better to smile and talk of “peace” till the time is right.
Yes the West is weak and decedent whose “liberal” ideology makes it unwilling to do hard things or even see obvious dangers.
But there is no point, Mohammed would have argued, in pushing one’s luck. The West might still wake up if they are constantly prodded and poked – and that would be a very bad thing for the millions of Muslims living in the West.
The Westerners were not always the weak and degenerate people we are now – once they were fierce men of war. Men who matched the forces of Islam in blood in over a thousand years of conflict – even if this forgotten (or hopelessly twisted) due to the media and the “education system”.
Smile, talk of “peace” – only kill when the time is right for VICTORY. That would be the council of Mohammed.
ISIS and others have the ruthlessness of Mohammed – but NOT his military and political genius.
And Mohammed was a military and political genius.
I have no hesitation in saying that.
For the record I think the West will lose this conflict in the long run. Not today – not tomorrow, but eventually.
The talk after the Paris attacks has convinced me of this – as all the talk has been of how this is “nothing to do with Islam” and so on.
Even highly intelligent people whom I respect (and who are successful in their lives – whereas I am a failure) just say “well all the Muslims I know are lovely people” and stuff like that.
As if “being a Muslim” was like have brown eyes – not having a set of beliefs, of wishing to follow the example of Mohammed.
I am sure that the vast majority of people who call themselves Muslim are lovely people – and I am also sure that this is not relevant to the discussion.
The fierce men of war who held back Islam for over a thousand years – they, for the most part, are gone.
Replaced by traders (or, more likely, bureaucrats) who want to be friends with everyone and fight “limited wars” not wars to wipe-out their enemies.
And every day a little more of the towns and cities of Europe quietly fall. And there is no plan to reverse this – indeed to even mention it is to invite the cry of “racist” and “Islamophobe”.
Whom the Gods (Islam would say God) wish to destroy – they first drive out of their wits.
Islam does not face Ancient Rome – it faces Ancient Carthage. People who do everything by half measures and always want to “make a deal” – who can not conceive of other people who play-for-keeps and whose desire is to remove-them-from-this-Earth.
WAIT expand your numbers (by immigration, natural increase, and by CONVERSION) and the lands of the West will eventually fall into your hands like ripe fruit.
Or rotten fruit.
So there is really no point in discussing this any more.
A couple of years ago I saw a survey claiming that 30% of the British people self identified as Church of England. Church attendance (all denominations) at the time was about 4%. Clearly 90% of those who self identified as Anglicans didn’t really mean it. There has been no penalty in Britain for failing to be Anglican in my lifetime (64 years). Clearly 90% of the self proclaimed Anglicans were motivated by something other than faith or coercion. May I suggest a simple wish to identify as British?
If there were similarly no coercion to appear to conform to Muslim values we would therefor expect that 90% of self identified Muslims were similarly seeking an identity, rather than professing sincere belief? However we know that people in the Muslim world face considerable coercion- ultimately apostasy means death and short of that there is strong social disapproval.
My conclusion is that more than 90% of self identified Muslims are not true believers, They like their alleged Anglican counterparts are simply going with the flow,
Bin Laden was right to emphasise the strong horse. If some belief system emerged self confident enough to challenge Islam most “Muslims” would change sides.
Bear in mind those Muslims who fought for Britain during WW1 and WW2 did so because they thought Britain the strong horse.
Sorry P M:
A further thought:
“Terrorists” be they Irish, Red Brigades, Weathermen or what have you from or within any social grouping, including those propelled by ideology, do what they do because they can.
They have the time;
the capacities;
and the opportunities.
Only a small part of any society has all those in their daily lives. Therefore, the great bulk don’t because they can’t.
@ Paul Marks
The west may lose this, but Islam is doomed. A creed that fails to use the productive capacity of women, and indeed reduces the productive capacity of men by requiring them to escort women simply lacks the productive capacity to prevail.
Sure a creed that decrees three men out of four will remain unmarried maintains the reproductive capacity and simultaneously maximizes the number of single frustrated males available to fight. And especially so if it seriously disincentivises them from taking comfort with each other or seeking solace in a bottle. But in the end materiel matters as much as men, and Muslims cannot produce that.
And such a creed appeals to sixteen year olds, each of which imagines that he will be the lucky one with four wives.
Islam has grown and survived by banditry (Mohamed’s profession during his time at Medina) first by stealing from caravans, then by stealing neighbour’s lands and then by taxing all the east-west trade over the old land routes.
The beginning of the end for Islam was when western nations built ships to trade directly with the Orient, thus by-passing the trade routes and depriving the Islamic nations(s) of a significant portion of their income, at the same time making both occident and orient richer than otherwise.
Westerners discovered and extracted oil In Muslim lands and were kind enough to pay the Muslims rent on this. I seriously doubt that there is any basis in Sharia law for the payment of rent in these circumstances. Hence Muslim lands have received an influx of money the last few decades, which has had the effect of increasing respect for their religion, at home as well as abroad.
If oil prices stay low, and I expect they will, the Muslim countries must either learn to trade competitively (which will effectively if not nominally) mean abandoning Islam, or they will fade into powerlessness.
However, do not discount the possibility that the Chinese or the Indians rather than the West be the prime beneficiaries of Islam’s decline.
Martha, that is a false comparison.
Christianity incorporates the Tanuk and refers back to it. The Koran is supposed to surplant all the other, inferior, religions with the true version, itself, alone. It does not incorporate anything from before it, but corrects their mistakes. As for prophets, Christians believe that Jesus is the last prophet, whilst Muslims claim that for Mohammed. Islam needs an explanation for the prior prophets, but Christians can ignore anyone after Jesus.
Sure. Judaism ignores everything beyond the scope of its own tradition. Christianity reinterprets the Torah as it suits it and Islam reinterprets both the New and Old Testament as they suits it. This is not an issue of comparison but of origin and legacy, something that cannot be said about, for example, the writings of Confucius as they have nothing to do with either Christianity, Islam, or Judaism.
In the interests of fairness there’s a lot of that that goes on in the areas that are nominally “Christendom”.
Martha, Jesus did not say, “The torah has been corrupted- I have been given the truth- ignore your holy texts- obey my speeches.” He quoted from the previous books, and expanded on their meanings (like the Psalms being prophesies, etc.)
Mohammed needed to claim that the books had been corrupted, to explain why Mohammed was not quoting things as they were written in the Scriptures (and why he kept getting names wrong, lke Issa instead of Yehoshua).
Like other false prophets (can you say Joseph Smith?) he claimed that he had been granted THE correct instructions for all mankind.
This is why muslims don’t have or use the two great instructions from Jesus- 1) the Golden rule, treating others fairly, and 2) Say only yeah or nay, letting your word be your bond.
Jim @November 22, 2015 at 4:32 pm:
That was the claim made by Norman Angell in his 1909 pamphlet, The Great Illusion. Kipling had previously suggested it in his 1903 poem “The Peace of Dives”. Sadly, both of them were wrong.
Most “ordinary” people are not killers or nutters. But they are weak and will do–when push comes to shove–what killers and nutters in “power” tell them to. Power attracts killers and nutters. It is therefore best to assume that the ordinary folk will be subject to and will obey the orders of killers and nutters when the time comes.
Should the conflict brought about by radical Islamists increase beyond containment by policing it will usher in a destructive phase that cannot help but destroy what is a productive but fragile, complex and interdependent system that delivers a cossetted existence for some of the worlds citizens and feeds substantial numbers of the rest. Once this threat, with mass starvation as a very real prospect, dawns on a peoples who today are weak and pathetic then our primeval instincts will take over. The resultant wars, and they will not necessarily be nuclear, are going to change the face of the world as the populations of Europe, most of the Middle East, Africa and Russia regress into survival modes for the strong. This will happen even if it come about due to greater Islamic fertility. The reason being that Islam inhibits the creation of those technical abilities essential to running an advanced industrial and social regime. The only hope is that this will be recognised by adherents of this ideology and they will embrace reform along the lines of ‘The Enlightenment’ that transformed European culture. I am not optimistic.
Essentially most muslims might not actually wage war but an awful lot of them have to go along with whatever is trending.
It has been said that nowhere in their holy book does it says a woman has to cover her hair, yet the pronouncement that women must cover their hair as an act of modesty — a possibly male-only opinion on what modesty means — means that almost all muslim women are either too scared to ‘rebel’ or too happy to go along with what is said they should do. In the same spirit, the majority of muslims must tacitly support their religion and if someone interprets the ‘word of God’ as meaning kill anything that moves (especially, it should be noted, other muslims) then the majority have to or will endeavour to, perhaps quietly for now, support it.
It has also been said that there are no moderate or extremist muslims a such. There is only islam.
Quite the opposite is the case, Martha: Judaism is in fact distinct in its built-in need and capacity to be open to outside influences, by examining them and consequently absorbing or rejecting them, or modifying them before incorporating them into its tradition. In that sense, it is the most UN-doctrinal religion I know of.
un-doctrinal – capitalization unintended, while amusing 😛
I think if you count the terrorism which is internally directed, the numbers would look a lot worse. A fact that the left seems to want to gloss over. It’s bad enough being born into a religion but Islam has heinous penalties for coming to the decision that it’s just not for you. This is not just one sect to another either but between people within their individual sects.
As bad as Islam is towards outsiders (and I’m not minimizing that in any way), the sheer inhumanity it impresses on its “adherents” dwarfs that in comparison. It is not a religion for a civilized world.
Murder and mayhem is simply not a sustainable industry.
The insights of Arthur Laffer apply to Islamist death culters as much as they do to socialism. Sooner or later, Islamists/collectivist run out of other people’s money.
Paul, I think you’re right. The West will die from its insecurities, lack of resolve and misguided sense of compassion. But until that happens sons s nd daughters of Liberty will put up a helluva fight. I know I will…
Alisa, you made a funny! Congrats!
Barry, Islam itself says that innovation is a sin. Therefore, it cannot reform. Also, Muslims are guided by the Hadiths, stories about Mohammed, and he has plenty of violence attached to him in those, so their role-model is that of a war-lord, or gangster boss.
The question “Why are there so few Muslim terrorists?” is not that much different than the question “why are there so few farmers?”. After all everyone loves (and needs) to eat, given that we DIE if we can’t eat, why shouldn’t all of us be toiling away farming 24/7. At one time, the answer to this question would be, “yes, most people are”. But modern Muslims (whether in the West or in Muslim lands) are, compared to their ancestors (if not other non-Muslims) incredibly well off; those who can afford to farm (so to speak) the job out to others. Just because we don’t grow food doesn’t mean we don’t like (or need) to eat it. Modern Muslims have too much to lose by going full out Jihadists and, at any rate, can satisfy the need vicariously through those who are simply bat-shit crazy enough to join ISIS. That doesn’t mean that they neither buy into the doctrine or are not extremely sympathetic to those who are willing to act on it.
Most Muslims live in countries with a government that pays lip-service to Mohammedism, so they are probably content. The others live in non-Mo countries, where they can be regularly offended. these are the likely jihadies of the future.
Should we send them to the hell-hole of their choice? Or to a muslim Coventry?
We all know that Muslim terrorists are few and far between, however, the socialist known to the world as Malala, who appears to be a sort of an ardent Leftist’s version of a Kardashian but without the entourage of hangers-on, has come up with a rather strange comment, if Channel 4 News is to be believed, and which has been reported as an attack on Mr Trump.
Who is the ‘we‘? There is no recognition here that being ‘radicalised’ is not a physical or chemical reaction, it is a decision to adopt a particular worldview. Is it really that easy to manufacture terrorists? Is Mr Trump that influential? When has he spoken out against all Muslims? I must have missed that.
Is this comment not saying ‘Please shut up and don’t talk about things?’ Is that not feeding Mr Trump’s agenda?