Islamic Terrorists vs American Murderers

Source: http://www.thebostoncalendar.com/events/being-muslim-in-america-and-mit-in-2016--2

I was walking through an airport earlier in this election season, when I saw prominent Republican Newt Gingrich on the television. He was speaking at some Republican convention, and said one thing in particular that stood out to me:

Source: http://stg.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/20/newt-gingrich/gingrich-9-pakistanis-support-isis/

He was making the point that not all Muslims are bad, but that an absurd number of them are.

This is a classic case of making a statistic sound frightening, simple by leaving out a comparison. It turns out, lots of kinds of people are angry and violent, not just Muslims.

Here’s an interesting statistic released a month earlier, which asked Americans questions regarding the election.

Source: http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_National_33116.pdf

That’s 24% of 300 million people- “and that’s just one country”

These statistics are asking different questions, but ones I think are very similar given the context. Politically violent people will want to use the resources available to them- for us, that can be nukes. For people in many other countries with less resources, it’s guerilla warfare or terrorism.

I wonder- what if there is actually a very small correlation between culture and values? Could every culture have their own ‘flavor’ of helpful and harmful people? Maybe all societies have members who think that their way of living is right, and other ways of living are wrong. Maybe every culture also has those people who think:

“People are people.”

Perhaps if we could really take on an impersonal, third person perspective, we would see that the political conflicts of today are very two sided. Unfortunately, if we only get our information from one side, it may appear different.

Here’s another basic and enlightening comparison.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States

This graph shows the number of deaths per year, globally, from terrorist attacks. Muslims carry out some fraction of these attacks.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States

This graph shows how many people are murdered every year in the US alone.

The total number of people killed in terrorist attacks across the world is roughly the same as the number of people murdered every year in the United States.

So the next time you hear a shocking statistic about “them”- whoever they are, take a second to compare that to the statistics on “us”.

“Don’t complain about the snow on your neighbor’s roof when your own doorstep is unclean” -Confucius

“You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” -Matthew 7:5