Facts Will Make You Think Twice About American Muslims
If this is what you think American Muslims condone, please read.
Facts are stubborn things and Josh Holland lays out a bunch of them for consumption concerning American Muslims. Islam’s 1.5 billion adherents around the world are highly diverse, and these facts are certainly illuminating and should (but won’t) dispel myths floating around about Muslims.
Religious breakdown by rate.
Forty percent of Muslim Americans hold a college degree, compared with 29 percent of the population as a whole, and one in three have a “professional” job. Muslim women are second only to Jewish women as far as educational achievement and work outside the home at the same rate as Muslim men. The gender gap in pay among American Muslims is smaller than that of any other religious group.
Muslims seem to have this gender equality thing figured out.
American Muslims
There are somewhere between 2 million and 7 million Muslim Americans in this country. San Bernadino perpetrator Syed Rizwan Farook became the 23rd American Muslim to carry out a terror attack in the United States since 9/11. Over those 14 years, these incidents resulted in 64 deaths. That’s 64 out of well over 200,000 murders in the United States during the same period. More than twice as many Americans died in mass shootings in 2014 alone.
Through the end of 2014, another 230 or so Muslims have been implicated in terrorism in some way though most planned to go overseas to join groups like ISIS. For comparison, it’s estimated that around 3,000 people have made that journey from the European Union over the past few years. In total, 112 Muslim Americans have been identified as plotting attacks in the United States since 9/11. That’s about eight per year, from within a population of millions.
With as many as seven million American Muslims and around 300 million guns in private hands, last week’s massacre in San Bernardino should be routine if those who feel all Muslims are terrorists, terrorist sympathizers or connected to terrorism were correct. It’s clear they are not. Those who believe so need to think again. If you still think that 112 people in 14 years constitute a real threat:
“Two-thirds of the domestic plots were disrupted early, with weapons or explosives provided by undercover agents or informants.”
– Charles Kurzman, Professor of Sociology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writing for the Triangle Center on Terrorism and National Security
It seems clear. Islam, like Judaism, Christianisty, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Confuscianism, Atheism, Agnosticism or any other belief set, poses no problem when its adherents enjoy a modicum of prosperity in a pluralistic society with decent governance.
