I read that 23 percent of the world’s population is Muslim, or 1.6 billion people. Whatever the number is, it’s large. How many are terrorists out to terrorize westerners and push them out of areas they consider to be Muslim areas? How many are terrorists who attack other Muslims? How many are terrorists who attack people of other religions? One source says that Muslim attacks worldwide and against all targets, failed and successful, add up to 18,000 since 2001. This number is bound to be controversial and subject to error. If this involved 18,000 Muslims, that’s a little over one-thousandth of one percent of Muslims who engaged in a terrorist or violent attempted attack or attack anywhere in the world.
How many Muslims have American forces killed since 2001? I’ve found a low-end estimate for 1990 to 2009, and it’s 288,000. How many of these were Muslim terrorists? I can’t find a tally so far. The number is very, very small relative to 288,000. The tally for drone strikes is 2-3,000 with a high proportion being innocent people. Drone strikes produce more terrorists than they kill, according to a former CIA official.
What’s my point? Same as always. The entire war on terror, or whatever name it now carries, should be stopped, abandoned, shut down, ended. By and large, it has done nothing but kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims. Drones are relatively less destructive than ouright armed force attacks as in Iraq, but they too are killing innocents and alienating whole populations. Plus Obama has extended their use into all kinds of countries, thereby entangling the U.S. in future difficulties. Plus they are being run by the unaccountable and rogue CIA.
Terrorism should be handled in a very different way. It should be handled more or less as something akin to crime but a few notches above that when it involves groups. Such groups are more like a Mafia, if they combine, or otherwise like street gangs, but gangs that have turned to intentional mayhem and destruction. Fighting terrorism does take some inter-state cooperation of domestic agencies tasked with identifying and apprehending terrorists.
9:42 am on October 16, 2012
