Percentages

Like many writers who comment of radical Islam, I do believe that most Muslims are good, decent people who want nothing more than to live in peace. My criticism of Islam is that it has been extremely passive in the face of Islamic terror and has done little to cleanse its religion/ideology of the cancer that has attacked it.

But what does "most Muslims" mean? The reason for the question is to better understand the magnitude of the threat that the West (and moderate Muslims) face. After all, if "most" is 99.9 percent, then we have nothing to worry about. And if "most" a bare majority, the threat is probably insurmountable, even if Islam itself tries to reform and destroy the Islamists in its midst.

After the Paris Islamic terror attacks, Barack Obama made the claim that "99.9% of Muslims" reject "radical terrorism." Obama refuses to connect terror and Islam in any way, so his statement was as predictable as it was dishonest.

Josh Galernter comments on some recent polling within the Muslim world:

Pew Research has polled the issue [of Muslim support for radical Islamist groups] extensively. In surveys of the Muslim populations of nine majority-Muslim countries, plus Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, an average of 57 percent have an unfavorable view of al-Qaeda, not 99.9 percent. Thirteen percent have a favorable view of al-Qaeda, not 0.1 percent. [emphasis mine]

One in four of the Muslims polled supports Hezbollah ... One in three supports Hamas ... In Turkey — which is a member of NATO — one in four Muslims believes suicide bombings are sometimes justified ... More than one in two Muslims believe this in Egypt and Jordan; more than two of three believe it in Nigeria.

The situation is not much different among Muslims in Western countries. In Britain and Spain, one in four Muslims believes suicide bombings are sometimes justified. One in three believes it in France. Slightly more than one in ten believes it in the United States (per a Pew poll from 2011). According to a poll conducted by a Georgetown Islamic Studies professor and a Gallup pollster, more than one in three Muslims worldwide believe that the 9/11 attacks were “somewhat,” “largely,” or “completely” justified (23.1 percent say “somewhat”; 13.5 percent say “largely” or “completely”).

According to CBS, polling shows that “almost one in four British Muslims believe that the [2005] 7/7 attacks on London were justified.” According to the Financial Times, polling shows that more than one in three British Muslims see Britain’s Jewish community as a “legitimate target as part of the struggle for justice in the Middle East.” Not Israelis but British Jews. Their Jewish neighbors. One in three.

According to the BBC, more than one in four British Muslims agree with the statement: “I have some sympathy for the motives behind the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.” According to a major Turkish newspaper — the Hürriyet Daily News — one in five Turks believes Charlie Hebdo’s murdered cartoonists “got what they deserved ... ”

I wholeheartedly believe that Muslim pro-terrorists are in the minority — but it’s a large and powerful minority; not a tenth of 1 percent. Pretending otherwise, for the sake of being sanctimonious, accomplishes nothing. Imagine if Muslims did shun terrorists the way Christians shun the KKK. At the risk of sounding sanctimonious myself, a little healthy shunning would make the world a much safer and much better place. It’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility — but wishing won’t make it so.

It appears, based on many respected polling organizations, that a non-trivial minority of Muslims support Islamist goals and Islamist organization. On average, it appears that an accurate percentage is between 20 and 25 percent. Extrapolating to the larger worldwide population leads to some frightening numbers: 1.6 billion x 20% = 320 million people (who might be expected to support Islamists). That's what moderate Muslims (who still number 1.2 billion) face when and if they act to excise the Islamist cancer.

Just imagine, if you will, if 20% of the worldwide population of Christians polled positive in their support of say, the Christian extremists groups like the Ku Klux Klan and its goals of white supremacy, violence against people of color, and other atrocities. How do you think Christian leaders and the other 80 percent of Christians would react? And if the KKK turned as violent as say, ISIS, do you have any doubt whatsoever that Christians would DEMAND their immediate eradication so that they would no longer stain Christianity? Why do we not see the same reaction coming out of the 1.2 billion moderate Muslims? It is concerning.

I've said it many times, and I'll say it again. Western leaders MUST call on the Islamic majority to rid itself of this Islamist cancer. Instead of lying about the percentage of Muslims who are sympathetic to Islamist thought and action, people like Barack Obama should state the actual percentages clearly, and then use them as a lever to persuade moderate Islam to act ... and act now!

UPDATE (11/25/15):
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Roger Simon comments further on the Muslim majority's passive stance against Islamists:

France's François Hollande and President Obama met Tuesday to come up with a strategy to defeat ISIS (0r ISIL, as Obama, for some coded reason, prefers to call it).

Defeat whom? Well, ISIL, stupid -- those bad people who have hijacked a great religion.

But have they? Is that what really happened? Why haven't hundreds of thousands of over a billion Muslims whose religion has been hijacked taken to the streets in protest? Or even tens of thousands? Or thousands... or hundreds?

Well, okay, at least 30 Muslims from Bangladesh were protesting in Paris in a city with 224,000 of their faith. They were chanting "Unite against brutality." But unite with whom?

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser? Zuhdi, a friend of mine, is a fantastic human being but he seems to be the only "moderate Muslim" we ever see on television. Where are the others?

I'm not being facetious. Where are they? Surely they exist, but they are curiously camera shy and in every other way. Are they frightened of ostracism... or perhaps they know something we don't about their own religion? They take seriously its dictums about apostates. Muslim organizations aren't helpful either. CAIR spends all its time accusing anyone who criticizes Islam even slightly of "Islamophobia" [sic], when they're not busy defending Hamas or Hezbollah.

The truth is nobody knows how many moderate Muslims there really are. We do know such things as, according to a recent poll, that about a third of the Syrian refugees do not want ISIS defeated. Twenty-five percent are even open to recruitment by the terror organization. That's a lot of people on a global level.

Yet our president and his putative successor Mrs. Clinton refuse to call the Islamic State Islamic or to link the I-word with terrorism, not even with the qualifier "radical."

We hear about the "Arab street" only when there is some "offense" that has occurred against Islam. Interesting that the Arab street has remained eerily silent on ISIS and Islamists in general. That would be an interesting phenomenon for Hillary Clinton to address right after she tells us that 99.9 percent of Muslims don't support Islamist thought.