What should we make of the often heard reference to “religious terrorism,” coupled with the innuendo that religion is a uniquely dangerous influence when it comes to just how far people will go in the name of their God, even to the point of outright terrorism?

I know, finding rhetorically cute but terribly skewed and misleading comments on religion from the late Christopher Hitchens is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. It was his forte after all. But because it does dovetail nicely with the issue that caught my eye today, here’s a memorable gem from his book God is not Great:

A week before the events of September 11, 2001, I was on a panel with Dennis Prager, who is one of America’s better-known religious broadcasters. He challenged me in public to answer what he called a “straight yes/no question,” and I happily agreed. Very well, he said. I was to imagine myself in a strange city as the evening was coming on. Toward me I was to imagine that I saw a large group of men approaching. Now—would I feel safer, or less safe, if I was to learn that they were just coming from a prayer meeting? As the reader will see, this is not a question to which a yes/no answer can be given. But I was able to answer it as if it were not hypothetical. “Just to stay within the letter ‘B,’ I have actually had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. In each case I can say absolutely, and can give my reasons, why I would feel immediately threatened if I thought that the group of men approaching me in the dusk were coming from a religious observance.”

Yes, it’s a case of thinking quickly on his feet, and yes the examples he cites are probably fair game, given the actual scenarios he describes from the 1970s and 80s, and yes it’s made all the more punchy by the Sesame Street style “things that start with the letter B” approach, and there’s a rhetorically powerful (but terribly misleading) effect being elicited in the reader along the lines of “Wow, and that’s just the letter B! And there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet, so that’s six times twenty-six…”

It’s a popular card to play. When you aren’t in the mood for offering arguments for the truth or falsehood of religious beliefs, just go all anti-realist and appeal to the harm done by adherents of religious beliefs (because you know, that tells us which ones are true of course). But it’s a very risky card to play. And I’m not even talking about the obvious: That one-off, large-scale atrocities were worse under secular regimes than under religious ones. We know that. But set aside the errors of the past, give everyone a blank slate, and ask: What’s going on in the world today? I’m not doing any of this to bash or malign any group of people (other, I guess, than those who make inappropriate generalisations about religion and extremism or violence). But I do want to draw attention to a couple of things: First, the fast and loose way that some people are inclined to use (and interpret) the word “religion,” and secondly, the way that this simple religious/non-religious categorisation doesn’t make the non-religious looks squeaky clean. Let me be clear. I do not endorse the tactic of besmirching a general outlook based on the misdeeds of its less sociable adherents (that’s a mild way of describing them). But given that this is a tactic that is used against religion as a blanket category far too often, it seems appropriate to draw on the empirical data to see if it tells us anything relevant (as one should assume that it would).
Read the rest of the entry »

Sometimes the facts are unpopular. The title is not meant to imply that I’m going to talk about facts that connect homosexuality and Islam. Simply because neither one of these statistical realities really deserved a blog post of its own, I’ve combined them into one.

Unpopular fact 1: There aren’t nearly as many homosexuals out there as some would like you to believe.

Sorry folks, it’s true.

Just one in 100 people in the UK say they are gay or lesbian, the first ever survey of British sexual identity has revealed.
A further one in every 200 people are bisexual, according to the data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

So if we combine the homosexuals and bisexuals, that’s 1.5%. Now, depending on which homosexual group you ask (until this data came out), you might have heard anything from 7% to 10%. A recent article by Jacqui Stanford over at New Zealand homosexual / bisexual / transexual interest website GayNZ expresses “disbelief” at recent statistics to come out of the UK.

The new estimate that just 1.5 percent of Britain’s population is gay or bisexual is being met with utter disbelief. The Office of National Statistics came up with the surprising figure after interviewing more than 450,000 people. It’s a massive drop from previous estimates of 5-7 percent.

Well, here’s the unpopular truth (well, unpopular with some, anyway): The figure is not even slightly surprising, and there has never been a reputable estimate of 5-7 percent.

Here’s the unusual line of reasoning that the GayNZ article draws on:

Correspondent Mark Townsend points out in The Observer that the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, most recently conducted 10 years ago, asked 11,000 Britons: ‘Ever had sex with a same sex partner, including genital contact?’ More than 6 percent of the respondents replied: ‘Yes.’ “Are we to believe the pool of potential partners for gay and bisexuals has recently evaporated by millions? If not, then why the vast discrepancy?” he writes.

Notice the slippery standard: Townsend notes that in a (very much smaller) survey, a little over six percent of adults said that at some point in their lives they had either had sex with a same sex partner or had genital contact with one. Notice that this is not a question about the present, nor is it a question about whether a person considers themselves homosexual or bisexual (for example, a respondent may have been thinking of a drunken mistake, and experiment that turned them off ever considering bisexuality, or a dare, any one of which might have occurred some years ago), and it includes people who have engaged in behaviour that may not even be regarded as having sex of any kind. But notice that the article at GayNZ uses that data to attempt to overturn a vastly more comprehensive study (with forty times as many people surveyed – the “largest social survey ever produced by the ONS” ) which actually asks about whether or not people consider themselves heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. GayNZ is clearly comparing apples with oranges. It’s like saying that if a person has ever tasted meat at any time in history (or even just touched it!) then they can’t possibly be a vegetarian.

As I have noted at this blog before, the UK is not unique here. Similar statistics exist for New Zealand as well, for example. According to a well known University of Otago study (see the last link), “Less than one per cent of people identified themselves as homosexual, but three per cent had a same-sex encounter.”

So this isn’t news. It will merely be spun as “surprising” or “doubtful” by those who perhaps wish things were otherwise. Sorry. Facts is facts, and it’s no good complaining that the facts are in poor taste.

Unpopular fact 2: Far more Muslims in America support suicide bombing than some Western Islamic spokespeople would like you to believe.

I know, I know, it’s supposed to be an unfair, ignorant stereotype: The crazed Muslim suicide bomber blowing himself (or herself) up, taking as many infidels out of this world as possible in the process. We’re not supposed to think that way about Muslims. That stereotype is based on a tiny tiny handful of very unique extremists in non-Western nations where they don’t have democracy and all that good stuff. To say otherwise is not merely mistaken, it’s impolite!

So for the second time in one month let me make myself unpopular (with some people, anyway). The facts indicate that this politeness may be misplaced:

The survey by the Pew Research Center, one of the most exhaustive ever of the country’s Muslims, revealed a community that in many ways blends comfortably into society. Its largely mainstream members express nearly as much happiness with their lives and communities as the general public does, show a broad willingness to adopt American customs, and have income and education levels similar to others in the U.S.
Even so, the survey revealed noteworthy pockets of discontent.
While nearly 80 percent of U.S. Muslims say suicide bombings of civilians to defend Islam can not be justified, 13 percent say they can be, at least rarely.
That sentiment is strongest among those younger than 30. Two percent of them say it can often be justified, 13 percent say sometimes and 11 percent say rarely.

Reflect on that. In the American Muslim population below the age of thirty, twenty six percent maintain that suicide bombing is acceptable in some cases. That’s just over a quarter of them.

Say it’s unpleasant, say it’s mean to point the facts out (but be prepared to say why, of course), but don’t say it isn’t true.

The facts, quite frankly my dear, don’t give a damn about what’s popular.

Pope Benedict is in the bad books of Muslims, so it seems. Here’s a typical example of the outrage.

One of the terrible things the Pope did was to quote criticisms of Islam from another pope, especially concerns about the teachings of Mohamed “such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

And what type of criticism is being leveled at the Pope? Apparently he offended Muslims. He insulted them. He said things that made them upset. But notice this carefully: The criticism is not that he said things that we can show to be false.

Interestingly, just hours after the Pope’s speech, a nun in Italy itself was shot dead by Muslim Somali gunmen. Also prior to the Pope’s apologies, Muslims in the West Bank firebombed two Churches, a reaction repeated elsewhere as well. So what’s the message here? “Screw your half hearted apology! We’re not violent, and if you say we are, you’re dead meat!”

A few minutes ago I was watching the news (One News), and saw this story. A New Zealand woman is in hospital after being shot by a gunman. She was with a tourist party, one of whom – a British man – was killed by the assailant. The story is at various news websites, like here and here.

It’s a sad but true story, but here’s what struck me about what I saw on One News tonight. The newsreader told us that the gunman shouted “God is great” before opening fire, and there was no reference to terrorism or to Islam. Here’s the thing: A lot of uninformed New Zealand viewers don’t realise that “God is great” is not what the man said, this is a translation of what he said: “Allahu Akbar!” It is the most succinct statement of the Muslim faith. This Islamic phrase is a battle cry of terrorism. Those unfortunate enough to have seen any of the beheading videos in Iraq will know it all too well.

Why did our news media misrepresent what took place, and the way this Muslim gunman identified his cause? Are they afraid of using the M word?

The two Fox News journalists who were abducted by a Muslim group in Gaza two weeks ago have been released at last.

This is very good news. I did find this detail interesting:

Hours before their release, a video on the Palestinian news service Ramattan TV showed the two reading statements proclaiming they had converted to Islam. But the two later explained they had done so at gunpoint, and that the conversion was not real.

Convert or die. When will people begin to get it?

Reuter’s has had to withdraw all of its photos from one of their sources (now an ex source) in Lebanon, a Muslim gentleman by the name of Adnan Hajj. He had been found to be doctoring photos to make the damage done by Israeli forces look more extensive than it actually was.

It’s not the only type of fraud by photo that has occurred either. Here’s another recent example. A photo in Beirut, dated 24th July 2006, shows a clearly identifiable scene, with one of the buildings having been flattened. The story tells us that “Journalists are shown by a Hizbollah guerrilla group the damage caused by Israeli attacks on a Hizbollah stronghold in southern Beirut, July 24 2006. (Adnan Hajj/Reuters)” But then what’s this? Later, on August the 5th, a different photo of the exact same spot with a woman walking past is released, and we are told “A Lebanese woman looks at the sky as she walks past a building flattened during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut’s suburbs August 5, 2006. (Adnan Hajj/Reuters)”

That’s either some really fast rebuilding, or some super fast talking. But it doesn’t end there.

See this photo? Here’s what we are told: A Lebanese woman wails after looking at the wreckage of her apartment, in a building, that was demolished by the Israeli attacks in southern Beirut July 22, 2006. REUTERS/Issam Kobeisi (from Yahoo News)

Sounds tragic, right? Think again.

Have you seen this woman before? Here’s what we are told this time: A Lebanese woman reacts at the destruction after she came to inspect her house in the suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, Saturday, Aug. 5, 2006, after Israeli warplanes repeatedly bombed the area overnight.(AP Photo/Hussein Malla) (from Yahoo News)

There’s no propaganda like free propaganda. Hizbollah have more than they need with the combined force of Reuter’s, Allied Press and Yahoo, along with anyone else who publishes whatever Lebanese correspondents who are party to the conflict give them.

Just imagine that a Christian man in New York was convicted of killing his sister in an utterly brutal stabbing and cutting her throat, because she fell in love with a member of the wrong caste according to her church. Then, imagine that this happens so often in Christian circles that there was a name for it – Honour killings.

How would this phenomenon cast Christianity in the eyes of the world? Even if someone could show you that the Bible doesn’t teach that this practice is OK, what if it was still true that this practice was uniquely widespread in Christianity, and that it was justified by Christian communities around the world?

Samaira Nazir was stabbed 18 times by her brother and cousin, and as she tried to escape, they dragged her back and cut her throat, while her mother watched, consenting to what was being done. Her Muslim family, living in England, considered this an acceptable thing to do, because she fell in love with a man outside of her caste. This happens so frequently in Muslim familes around the world that there is a name for it – Honour killings.

These events are not rare. In the first 11 months of 2005 in Pakistan alone, there were 260 honour killings carried out by Muslim families that were documented by the Pakistan human rights commission. Many are not reported at all, simply because those who know of them approve of them.

I agree with the condemnation of homosexual (or heterosexual, for that matter) Catholic priests who molest children. But why do we hear so much about it, but the anti-religious left don’t come out guns blazing calling Islam a religion of violence, sexism and terror? Let’s cut the crap, the difference between Muslims who slaughter their women like animals and those of us who don’t isn’t merely sociological or economic, it’s religious.

We’re scaredy cats. People who insult Islam get people marching with placards calling for our public beheading. Muslims who get upset blow people into pieces of pet food. So what’s the message here? Let’s start calling spades spades. The group that has lobbied harder for gender equality, an end to slavery and civil liberty than any other religious group can still be tarred and feathered as facists and abusers, but the religion in which a man can slit his daughter’s throat or pump her full of lead to save the honour of his family name is too spooky to condemn?

Stop pussyfooting around. I’m not a fan, but Anne Coulter had it right about Islamic nations. “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Don’t start flapping those pinko wrists around and lisping about how terrible that is. As it is, they hack heads off if people convert, and they butcher their sisters and daughters for the sake of their pride. Which is worse?