But Most of Them Are Fine!

This is not rhetoric – most of the people who use a line like “but most Muslims/etc. are decent normal people” aren’t going to be swayed by dialectic. Instead, this is to provide a foundation for understanding why, despite most people of a demographic being perfectly fine, a scant handful can still screw it up for everyone else, and render the entire demographic effectively suspect.

File this under “why we can’t have nice things.”

Recently, we’ve seen the rank hypocrisy of naming the asshole in Canada a totem of the “incel movement” and calling them all terrorists, while of course, “not all muslims are like that. How dare you pin terrorism on all Muslims.”

Let’s leave aside the question of a political ideology dressed up as a religion that explicitly calls for subjugating everyone to the will of Allah, where there is video after video of Mullahs preaching just that, in case you’re tempted to go “but they’ve reformed.”

Instead, look at Taleb’s intolerant minority. It only takes a very small percentage of true believers (see also the three percent of colonial forces in the American revolution).

But let’s set that aside as well. No ideology, no con- or pro- spiracies.

One terror attack, a week, in a city. How many people do we need?

Let’s be generous – these are all suicide or one-time attacks. We need new attackers each time, though support infrastructure stays the same. This way we don’t get one guy killing five, ten, twenty times, making a career of it.

Nevertheless, any one cell – let’s assume only one – needs a coordinator, a visionary, and a few people to handle logistics for materiel, weapons, bombs, etc.. On the low end we have the Tzarnev brothers, but at industrial scale we’ll need ten or twenty.

So 56 suicide bombers plus 14 support staff/safe house operators/trainers, etc.. 70 people.

Let’s say that in an ideological community, you only get 1% (remember, 3% is self-sustaining and can force eventual victory) recruitment, and heck, even half wash out, but are “soft” supporters. Call it 0.5%

The population needed to support that, hide a permanent revolutionary movement, operate on an ongoing basis, even though a TINY percentage are actively violent is 14,000.

By comparison, Savannah , GA, with more than 180 larger cities in the US, has 144,000 people.

Obviously we don’t have a bombing a day in the US (though the history of the late 2000’s in Iraq are educational in that regard) – but it is sobering how small a number is needed.

So how many terrorist attacks did we have in the US? Per Wikipedia – taken at face value, we had six in 2017. Note, this is after Pulse and San Bernandino, and the Youtube shooting was apparently motivated by other factors than religion (well, Vegan, but…). I also say “taken at face value” because the train stabbing was, as I recall, a mixed case where the person had been a Bernie supporter at one point. One case was some whack job without ideological ties even mentioned that wanted to kill black people, and they managed to get the “Unite the right” rally in as a terrorist act. But the other three – though one name sounds Uzbek and it’s not until halfway through the article you find it, share one thing – Islam.

So we have, at face value, three racist bigot attacks by white people, and three bombings/etc. by muslims.

Three million muslims in the US in 2017. 325 million people in the US, let’s say 40% are “white” as the left imagines Richard Spencer would define the term. 130 million white people.

1 attack in 2017 for every million muslims, 1 “terrorist” attack by white people in 2017 for every 43 million white people.

So sure, most of them are nice people, but a tiny difference in average ideologies and attitudes, less than 0.000001, results in an equal number of “terrorist” attacks. To get weekly attacks, with our current population without it being a hard core movement as seen in the middle east, would need less than one in ten thousand.

Either way, and we can’t assume a linear path – see the history of Lebanon – if we had 50 million muslims, or they became 20 times more likely to be violent to non-muslims (again, keep in mind this is a miniscule absolute percentage), or some combination of the two, we’d be up to a terrorist attack/bombing every week.

But most of them are nice people?

Only a very small percentage has to be otherwise, to be significantly worse than another population.