Juan Cole has penned an excellent and important article that puts to rest the Islamophobic claims of bigots that Muslims are more violent than people of other religions.

He mentions murder rates in the Muslim world which are very low compared to the USA and analyzes 20th century political violence by European Christians vs. Muslims. He comes to the low estimate for violence by Christians of European descent as 100 million and 2 million for Muslims. If one were to compare the higher estimates between the two groups it wouldn’t alter much.

Terrorism and the other Religions

by Juan Cole (Informed Comment)

Contrary to what is alleged by bigots like Bill Maher, Muslims are not more violent than people of other religions. Murder rates in most of the Muslim world are very low compared to the United States.

As for political violence, people of Christian heritage in the twentieth century polished off tens of millions of people in the two world wars and colonial repression. This massive carnage did not occur because European Christians are worse than or different from other human beings, but because they were the first to industrialize war and pursue a national model. Sometimes it is argued that they did not act in the name of religion but of nationalism. But, really, how naive. Religion and nationalism are closely intertwined. The British monarch is the head of the Church of England, and that still meant something in the first half of the twentieth century, at least. The Swedish church is a national church. Spain? Was it really unconnected to Catholicism? Did the Church and Francisco Franco’s feelings toward it play no role in the Civil War? And what’s sauce for the goose: much Muslim violence is driven by forms of modern nationalism, too.

I don’t figure that Muslims killed more than a 2 million people or so in political violence in the entire twentieth century, and that mainly in the Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 and the Soviet and post-Soviet wars in Afghanistan, for which Europeans bear some blame.

Compare that to the Christian European tally of, oh, lets say 100 million (16 million in WW I, 60 million in WW II– though some of those were attributable to Buddhists in Asia– and millions more in colonial wars.)

Belgium– yes, the Belgium of strawberry beer and quaint Gravensteen castle– conquered the Congo and is estimated to have killed off half of its inhabitants over time, some 8 million people at least.

Or, between 1916-1917 Tsarist Russian forces — facing the Basmachi revolt of Central Asians trying to throw off Christian, European rule — Russian forces killed an estimated 1.5 million people. Two boys brought up in or born in one of those territories (Kyrgyzstan) just killed 4 people and wounded others critically. That is horrible, but no one, whether in Russia or in Europe or in North America has the slightest idea that Central Asians were mass-murdered during WW I and looted of much of their wealth. Russia at the time was an Eastern Orthodox, Christian empire (and seems to be reemerging as one!).

Then, between half a million and a million Algerians died in that country’s war of independence from France, 1954-1962, at a time when the population was only 11 million!

I could go on and on. Everywhere you dig in European colonialism in Afro-Asia, there are bodies. Lots of bodies.

Now that I think of it, maybe 100 million people killed by people of European Christian heritage in the twentieth century is an underestimate.

As for religious terrorism, that too is universal. Admittedly, some groups deploy terrorism as a tactic more at some times than others. Zionists in British Mandate Palestine were active terrorists in the 1940s, from a British point of view, and in the period 1965-1980, the FBI considered the Jewish Defense League among the most active US terrorist groups. (Members at one point plotted to assassinate Rep. Dareell Issa (R-CA) because of his Lebanese heritage.) Now that Jewish nationalsts are largely getting their way, terrorism has declined among them. But it would likely reemerge if they stopped getting their way. In fact, one of the arguments Israeli politicians give for allowing Israeli squatters to keep the Palestinian land in the West Bank that they have usurped is that attempting to move them back out would produce violence. I.e., the settlers not only actually terrorize the Palestinians, but they form a terrorism threat for Israel proper (as the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin discovered).

Even more recently, it is difficult for me to see much of a difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the Hebron massacre.

Or there was the cold-blooded bombing of the Ajmer shrine in India by Bhavesh Patel and a gang of Hindu nationalists. Chillingly, they were disturbed when a second bomb they had set did not go off, so that they did not wreak as much havoc as they would have liked. Ajmer is an ecumenical Sufi shrine also visited by Hindus, and these bigots wanted to stop such open-minded sharing of spiritual spaces because they hate Muslims.

Buddhists have committed a lot of terrorism and other violence as well. Many in the Zen orders in Japan supported militarism in the first half of the twentieth century, for which their leaders later apologized. And, you had Inoue Shiro’s assassination campaign in 1930s Japan. Nowadays militant Buddhist monks in Burma/ Myanmar are urging on an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya.

As for Christianity, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda initiated hostilities that displaced two million people. Although it is an African cult, it is Christian in origin and the result of Western Christian missionaries preaching in Africa. If Saudi Wahhabi preachers can be in part blamed for the Taliban, why do Christian missionaries skate when we consider the blowback from their pupils?

Despite the very large number of European Muslims, in 2007-2009 less than 1 percent of terrorist acts in that continent were committed by people from that community.

Terrorism is a tactic of extremists within each religion, and within secular religions of Marxism or nationalism. No religion, including Islam, preaches indiscriminate violence against innocents.

It takes a peculiar sort of blindness to see Christians of European heritage as “nice” and Muslims and inherently violent, given the twentieth century death toll I mentioned above. Human beings are human beings and the species is too young and too interconnected to have differentiated much from group to group. People resort to violence out of ambition or grievance, and the more powerful they are, the more violence they seem to commit. The good news is that the number of wars is declining over time, and World War II, the biggest charnel house in history, hasn’t been repeated.

Share your Eid experiences in the comment sections.

Eid Al-Fitr is a celebration marking the end of Ramadan.

Eid-ul-Fitr, “Eid-ul-fitr”, Eid al-Fitr, Id-ul-Fitr, or Id al-Fitr (Arabic: ‎عيد الفطر ‘Īdu l-Fiṭr), often abbreviated to Eid, is a Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting (sawm). The religious Eid is a single day (a Muslim is not permitted to fast that day), but it is usually celebrated for 3 days. Eid is an Arabic word meaning “festivity”, while Fiṭr means “breaking the fast”. The holiday celebrates the conclusion of the 29 or 30 days of dawn-to-sunset fasting during the entire month of Ramadan. The first day of Eid, therefore, falls on the first day of the month Shawwal. This is a day where Muslims around the world try to show a common goal of unity.

Eid prayers and celebrations in the Subcontinent:

Eid prayer and celebrations in Jerusalem:

Eid prayer and celebrations in Morocco:

Eid is a time for whole families to get together and celebrate:

The Empire State Building lit up with the color of green in honor of Eid:

Samir Nasri kicked the winning goal for Manchester City, lifted his shirt which read, “Eid Mubarak”:

“Nasri secured the three points after Southampton left back Danny Fox inadvertently headed the ball to the France midfielder, who was booked for lifting his jersey in the goal celebration to reveal a t-shirt with the “`Eid Mubarak” greeting to mark the end of Ramadan.”

Thought provoking study from Gallup and Dalia Mogahed.

Muslims worldwide say respect is key to better relations with U.S., West

ADELLE M. BANKS, Religion News Service

WASHINGTON — About half of Muslims surveyed worldwide believe the West does not respect them, according to a new Gallup report, and many say not desecrating the Quran and portraying more “accurate” Muslim movie characters could improve a strained relationship.

The findings are part of a report on “Measuring the State of Muslim-West Relations,” released Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2010, at Gallup’s Washington headquarters.

“We also found that this concept of respect … now includes perceptions of fairness in policies, not just culturally sensitive language,” said Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies.

Fifty-four percent of Muslims said being treated fairly in policies that directly affect them would be a very meaningful demonstration of respect.
Mogahed said the “policies” were not defined in the new report, but past Gallup studies have found that respondents were particularly concerned about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nearly three-quarters of Muslims polled said increased respect for the Quran and other religious symbols would be helpful. About half want to see Muslims portrayed more accurately by Hollywood.

Researchers found people across the globe — from the United States to sub-Saharan Africa — believe the tensions between Muslim countries and the West are mostly avoidable.

“This was especially true among people who saw the conflict as political in nature,” Mogahed said, “rather than caused by religious differences.”

In most of the countries surveyed, people said greater interaction between Muslims and the West is a benefit rather than a threat. In the U.S., 76 percent of individuals saw such interaction as beneficial, compared to 63 percent of Iranians.

Gallup researchers classified individuals as being “ready” or “not ready” for Muslim-Western engagement based on their attitudes about commitment to such relations, as well as perceptions of respect and of future conflict.
Researchers said religion plays a key role in readiness.

“For ‘Not Ready’ individuals, irrespective of whether they live in majority-Muslim or Western societies, religion is the factor most likely to be cited as being at the root of Muslim-Western tensions,” the report stated in its executive summary.

The report detected a religious paradox between the two sides: people in majority-Muslim societies who were considered “ready,” and those in the West who were “not ready,” were both more likely to have attended religious services in the past week.

The findings are based on interviews with more than 100,000 in more than 55 countries between March 2008 and May 2010.

by Glenn Greenwald

(updated below – Update II)

The New York Times this morning has a particularly lush installment of one of the American media’s most favored, reliable, and self-affirming rituals — it’s time to mock and pity Those Crazy, Primitive, Irrational, Propagandized Muslims and their Wild Conspiracy Theories, which their reckless media and extremists maliciously disseminate in order to generate unfair and unfounded hostility toward the U.S.:

Conspiracy theory is a national sport in Pakistan, where the main players — the United States, India and Israel — change positions depending on the ebb and flow of history. Since 2001, the United States has taken center stage, looming so large in Pakistan’s collective imagination that it sometimes seems to be responsible for everything that goes wrong here. . . . The problem is more than a peculiar domestic phenomenon for Pakistan. It has grown into a narrative of national victimhood that is a nearly impenetrable barrier to any candid discussion of the problems here.  In turn, it is one of the principal obstacles for the United States in its effort to build a stronger alliance with a country to which it gives more than a billion dollars a year in aid.

Initially, it’s worth asking how these “conspiracy theories” compare to this:  from the front page of The New York Times, September 8, 2002:

More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today. . . . In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. . . . An Iraqi defector said Mr. Hussein had also heightened his efforts to develop new types of chemical weapons. An Iraqi opposition leader also gave American officials a paper from Iranian intelligence indicating that Mr. Hussein has authorized regional commanders to use chemical and biological weapons to put down any Shiite Muslim resistance that might occur if the United States attacks.

From the front page of The Washington Post, April 3, 2003:

Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday. Lynch, a 19-year-old supply clerk, continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting 11 days ago, one official said. . . . Lynch’s rescue at midnight local time Tuesday was a classic Special Operations raid, with U.S. commandos in Blackhawk helicopters engaging Iraqi forces on their way in and out of the medical compound, defense officials said.

Brian Ross, ABC News, the week of October 25, 2001:

[S]ources tell ABCNEWS the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite. The potent additive is known to have been used by only one country in producing biochemical weapons — Iraq. . . . Former UN weapons inspectors say the anthrax found in a letter to Senator Daschle is nearly identical to samples they recovered in Iraq in 1994. . . . At the same time those [anthrax] results were coming in, officials in the Czech Republic confirmed that hijack ringleader, Mohammed Atta, had met at least once with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, raising what authorities consider some extremely provocative questions.

NBC News, April 26, 2004:

Pat Tillman, who gave up the glamorous life of a professional football star to join the Army Rangers, was remembered as a role model of courage and patriotism Friday after military officials said he had been killed in action in Afghanistan. . . . [U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Matthew] Beevers said Tillman was killed by enemy fire, but he had no information about what type of weapons were involved in the assault, or whether he died instantly.

Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, February 10, 2003:

According to several intelligence officials I spoke to, the relationship between bin Laden and Saddam’s regime was brokered in the early nineteen-nineties by the then de-facto leader of Sudan, the pan-Islamist radical Hassan al-Tourabi. . . . In interviews with senior officials, the following picture emerged: American intelligence believes that Al Qaeda and Saddam reached a non-aggression agreement in 1993, and that the relationship deepened further in the mid-nineteen-nineties . . . I learned of another possible connection early last year, while I was interviewing Al Qaeda operatives in a Kurdish prison in Sulaimaniya. There, a man whom Kurdish intelligence officials identified as a captured Iraqi agent told me that in 1992 he served as a bodyguard to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, when Zawahiri secretly visited Baghdad. . . . [James] Woolsey, who served as President Clinton’s first C.I.A. director, said that it is now illogical to doubt the notion that Saddam collaborates with Islamist terrorism.

Bernard Lewis, Wall St. Journal, August 8, 2006:

Mr. Ahmadinejad and his followers clearly believe that this time is now, and that the terminal struggle has already begun and is indeed well advanced. It may even have a date, indicated by several references by the Iranian president to giving his final answer to the U.S. about nuclear development by Aug. 22. . . . This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers, January 11, 2002, explaining the treatment of detainees:

I mean, these are people that would gnaw hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down. I mean, so this is — these are very, very dangerous people, and that’s how they’re being treated.

And that’s to say nothing about the orgies of “conspiracy theories” churned out on a daily basis from right-wing talk radio, blog outlets, Fox News and even establishment Republicans over the years — from Iranian computer viruses, Vince Foster’s murder, the nefarious Muslim-Leftist alliance, ACORN’s omnipotence, and Obama death panels to The Vicious War on Christmas, the DOJ’s “Al Qaeda 7,” Maoist followers in the administration, Obama’s Kenyan birthplace and Islamic beliefs, and the subversive Congressional interns serving at the behest of CAIR.

* * * * *

There’s little doubt that many Pakistanis believe all sorts of things that are false and that some extremist sectors peddle paranoid conspiracies.  Propaganda is a standard tactic used by political and religious leaders of all types to manipulate their followers, as is casting blame on external enemies for those leaders’ failures.  Indeed, it’s virtually impossible to find a society free of extremist paranoia, and Pakistan undoubtedly has its share.  But look at the specific beliefs identified by the NYT as proof of how conspiratorial the Pakistanis are, and decide where the real propaganda is.

First we learn that “no part of the Pakistani state — either the weak civilian government or the powerful military — is willing to risk publicly owning [its] relationship” with the U.S., and that “[o]ne result is that nearly all of American policy toward Pakistan is conducted in secret, a fact that serves only to further feed conspiracies.”  The NYT specifically cites the fact that “the Central Intelligence Agency uses networks of private spies; and the main tool of American policy here, the drone program, is not even publicly acknowledged to exist.”

But isn’t exactly the same true in the U.S., where our most consequential acts in Pakistan — from drone attacks to Special Forces operations — are ones the U.S. Government will not even publicly acknowledge, let alone debate and describe?  Here’s what Hillary Clinton said when asked last December about the deaths of Pakistani civilians caused by U.S. actions in that country:  ”I’m not going to comment on any particular tactic or technology.”  And the NYT should perhaps check its own front page from yesterday, which detailed a secret order from last fall directing a massive escalation in the use of U.S. Special Forces in a whole slew of Muslim countries — all without any public discussion, debate, or authorization from Congress.  We’re essentially fighting covert, unauthorized wars in multiple Muslim nations — including Pakistan — all while the NYT mocks those silly Pakistanis for failing to publicly discuss their own military policies and for believing that the U.S. is engaged in unknown and unseen conduct in their country.

Then the NYT derides some Pakistanis for their crazy “theory that India, Israel and the United States — through their intelligence agencies and the company formerly known as Blackwater — are conspiring to destroy Pakistan.”  But what the NYT fails to mention is that the U.S. is actually using Blackwater for a wide variety of covert, lethal missions inside Pakistan, as The Nation‘s Jeremy Scahill has documented at length.  They may not be “conspiring to destroy Pakistan,” but they are engaged in “targeted assassinations,” “‘snatch and grabs’ of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan,” and “assist[ing] in gathering intelligence and help[ing] direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes.”

Given Blackwater’s history and the secrecy in which its conduct is shrouded, isn’t it more rational to worry about their conduct inside one’s country than to ignore it or assume it’s benign?  After all, if a foreign country were sending its military and intelligence services inside the U.S. to assassinate our citizens, drop bombs on us from robots in the air, and infiltrate our society with shadowy private contractors — as we’re doing to Pakistan — do you think we might be projecting intense hostility toward that country and expressing serious suspicions about what else they were doing inside our country?  Is it conspiratorial paranoia or rational self-interest that leads one to think that way?

As further proof of this pervasive myth-making in Pakistan, the NYT article cites the fact that one Pakistani lawyer with a talk show “argues that Al Qaeda is an American invention.”  While that’s not precisely true, it is a matter of undisputed fact that the mujahedeen who were the precursors to Al Qaeda — as well as Osama bin Laden himself — were supported and funded by the U.S. throughout the 1980s, all the way up to the formal founding of “Al Qaeda” itself:

Thousands of Muslim radicals joined the CIA and mujahedeen, including bin Laden, the wealthy son of a Saudi road builder. Though he didn’t actually take up arms, he helped build roads and arms depots, using his own funds and CIA money.

“We funded him, we and the Saudis,” said Glynn Wood, professor of international policy at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. . . . Pakistani investigative journalist Ahmed Rashid reported recently that the CIA funded an underground arms depot, training facility and medical center that bin Laden helped build in 1986 near the Pakistan border. There bin Laden set up his first training camp.

As the BBC said in 2004:  ”Bin Laden and his fighters received American and Saudi funding” in the 1980s and “[s]ome analysts believe Bin Laden himself had security training from the CIA.”  In 2007, Der Spiegel called bin Laden “one of the best customers for the CIA” during that decade.

In light of all that, what’s more irrational and propagandized:  believing that the U.S. was responsible for the birth of Al Qaeda (as some benighted Pakistanis do) or treating that belief as though it’s some wild, unhinged, crazed conspiracy theory with no basis in reality (as the NYT today does)?  The same is true for what the NYT castigates as Pakistani conspiracies “infused with anti-Semitism,” such as the belief that Jewish and Indian lobbies exert influence on U.S. Government foreign policy.  What rational person denies that such groups — along with a slew of others — exert political power in Washington, or that Israel maintains close military and other relations with Pakistan’s arch-enemy, India?

It’s not until the third-to-last paragraph that the NYT article cursorily acknowledges the clear basis which rational Pakistanis would have for being highly suspicious of American involvement in their country:

There are very real reasons for Pakistanis to be skeptical of the United States. It encouraged — and financed — jihadis waging a religious war against the Soviets in the 1980s, while supporting the military autocrat Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, who seeded Pakistan’s education system with Islamists.

And, of course, the U.S. propped up that country’s oppressive Musharraf regime with massive amounts of aid — not to mention the small fact that the U.S. invaded and has been militarily occupying two of Pakistan’s neighboring countries (one of which shares a large border with Pakistan) for almost the entire last decade.  In sum, the U.S. has covertly played a central role in the internal affairs of the region generally and Pakistan specifically for decades.  In light of that, what’s more irrational:  to question what the U.S. is up to or to treat such questions as the by-product of crazed and deranged fanaticism?

Finally, note how the NYT article is framed at the top by a photograph of a Pakistani holding a sign that reads “We Hate America” — as though the only reason someone might harbor such anti-American hostility is because they’ve been misled with false claims and conspiracy theories about Our Noble and Magnanimous Land.  That — about a country where we’ve propped up numerous oppressive regimes and continue to slaughter civilians via sky robots.  Of all the myths identified by the NYT article, the implicit one conveyed by that photograph – Pakistanis harbor anger toward the U.S. only because of false conspiracy theories they’re being fed — is easily the most extreme.

This game of Let’s Mock Those Crazy, Conspiratorial Arabs and Muslims is as useful as it is common:  recall how only the Paranoid “Arab Street” believed that the invasion of Iraq would lead to permanent American military bases in that country, only for this to be revealed, followed by this.  There is a lot of propaganda, paranoia and myth in Pakistan, along with most places in the world.  But the American media’s fixation on pointing to it and deriding it has the principal effect (if not intent) of obscuring the role we play in enabling (and even justifying) those sentiments, along with at least our own equal share of such propaganda and our own media’s central role in bolstering it.

UPDATE:  As one commenter suggested, no discussion of how populations are subjected to conspiratorial propaganda is complete without this, from USA Today in September, 2003:

UPDATE II:  For similar reactions to this NYT article, see here and here.