Your Muslims this week

Agent 6 wondered if "Islamization" by the numbers could be considered "fear-mongering". I don't think so. All that Peter Hammond has done is to present statistics as to the percentage of Muslims in certain countries -- not a Nobel-winning piece of research -- and look at recent political and social events in those countries. His inferences may be frightening to Christian Westerners, but that's not the good doctor's fault.

It has been suggested that Islam is not as bad as all that. Dr. Hammond and others who say there is a Muslim plot to "Islamize" the world are racists and xenophobes, some say...and don't much like strangers either! Let's look at the events of the last seven days and see if we can draw any conclusions.

Every week The Economist begins with "The world this week", a summary of the week's events in politics and business, one page of each. The 13 March issue has 21 items on the politics page. Here are seven of them, with comments from Walt.

• Bombs exploded in Baghdad to coincide with Iraq's election. Rival alliances of different Muslim groups are fighting -- literally -- for power. But that's democracy in the Middle East.
• Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims were supposed to hold "indirect talks", mediated by Joe Biden, over conflicting claims to Jerusalem. Let it be remembered that Jerusalem was first a Jewish holy city. Then it became holy to Christians because of the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Centuries later, the Muslims came along. Christians are only a tiny minority there now, but Muslims and Jews both claim they should control, not share, the entire city.
• Hundreds of Christians were massacred by Muslims in the Plateau state of Nigeria. Plateau lies betweenthe Muslim north and Christian south of that lawless country. The state and national "governments" are powerless to halt the carnage.
• One of Egypt's senior clerics, Sheikh Muhammad Tantawi, died of natural causes (?) in Saudi Arabia. The Economist says "he was a force for moderation who angered radical Muslims by...rejecting their insistence that Muslim women should be wholly covered."
• The White House said it would take weeks more to decide where to prosecute Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11. His supporters and the usual Voices of Human Rights think he should receive a fair trial in an ordinary criminal court, rather than a military trial which one might think should follow an act of war.
• A British cartoonist was convicted by a Turkish court for drawing a caricature of the country's prime minister as a dog. He narrowly escaped going to jail. In the West, of course, we are free to depict our presidents and prime ministers as dogs, or jackasses or whatever fits.
• A suicide bomb killed 13 Muslim government officials in Lahore, Pakistan. And another six were killed when a foreign aid agency's office in Manshehra, Pakistan, was bombed. The Pakistani bomb-throwing team is expected to own the podium in the next summer Olympics.

So, that's seven (7) stories out of 21, or 33%. Percentage of Muslims in the world, according to Dr. Hammond -- 22. 22% of the population, 33% of the bad news...this week.