"There are liars, damned liars, and statisticians."
The quote is attributed to Mark Twain (or sometimes to Benjamin Disraeli) and expresses the fact that numbers can be put to all kinds of uses. While statistics can be used responsibly, all too often they are used to confuse, frighten or manipulate.
Case in point, this showed up in my e-mail recently.
The movie, complete with scary music, warns that a declining birthrate in Europe and the U.S. and the current rate of immigration will transform Europe in the near future into a series of nations with Muslim majorities. This is an extremely dubious claim (as the good folks at Snopes.com demonstrate in this article, and it's followed by even more bizarre assertions such as this:
"By 2027, 1 in 5 Frenchmen will be a Muslim. In just 39 years, France will be an Islamic republic."
When you stop to think about it, this doesn't make much sense. Even in the unlikely event that France was to gain a Muslim majority, that would not make it an Islamic Republic. There are a few states in the world right now, including Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and Mauritania that call themselves that. Most Islamic majority nations use different forms of government and some, like Turkey, have completely secular governments.
The video implies that all Muslims are to be feared, that they are out to overrun the western world and do away with Christianity. You can tell it's reaching when it quotes Muammar al-Gaddafi to make the point. He doesn't speak for all Muslims or even all Libyans by any stretch of the imagination. He's a publicity hungry petty dictator known for making unreliable grand statements.
Muslims are no more a single group, united in their opinions than Christians are. They are part of a diverse world religion with some fanatics but a majority of decent, ordinary people. While there are certainly changes coming in the world (aren't they always?) and challenges to face learning to live with each other (again, this is nothing new) the kind of paranoid fear the video promotes is not going to help anyone.
I decided not to publish a comment that began with the phrase, "Islam is evel" (not my spelling).
ReplyDeleteFWIW, I'll usually allow comments with viewpoints other than mine, but the bulk of the message was an attempt to hawk anti-Muslim t-shirts. I won't let the blog be used like that.