Naam:  Wachtwoord:   Ingelogd blijven? Wachtwoord kwijt? (Waarom) Registreren
 
          
                         
Dit is het archief van Islamofobie.nl
Sinds juli 2014 verschijnen hier geen nieuwe stukken meer. De artikelen worden *) heringedeeld in acht categorieën: zie de knoppen links. Met uitzondering van de categorie 'Islam(itische ideologie)' is de indeling nu niet meer naar thema, maar naar aard van de stukken. Vier jaar lang lag het hoofdaccent op het voeren van de noodzakelijke ideologische strijd: zie het motto hierboven. In de komende jaren zal ik (initiatiefnemer en belangrijkste leverancier van teksten voor islamofobie.nl) me meer richten op de noodzakelijke politieke strijd. In termen van deze indeling: veel meer nadruk op Voorstellen, Politieke organisatie en iets meer op Opinie. LEES VERDER »
 
 


The rise of terrorism in 2014: how bad it was. In numbers.

It has been hard to seriously and ethically debate the mortal threat posed by the ideology of Mohammed. After 2014 this might change.
Those who are of the opinion that fundamentalism and (violent) extremism are on the rise among the followers of Mohammed in the last decades, feel a great sense of urgency to defeat the terrorists everywhere and to defuse the 'not yet fully moderated' ideology. Our opponents have been eager to focus on the 'good muslims they know personally'. Many of them were – and some still are – more worried about a possible 'backlash' of a confrontation: a backlash not just from fighting terrorists but also from the 'criticizing islam' part. They liked to believe that things are not that bad and were of the opinion that Muhammedan inspired terrorism should be interpreted primarily as a reaction to the way the Ottoman Empire ended after 1918 and the toppling of the regimes of the Taliban in Afghanistan and of Saddam Houssein in Iraq. Did they notice that "not one of the US, UK and French leaders who have invaded Muslim countries the last 20 years was a critic of Islam"? 1)
After 2014 it will be almost impossible to remain adamant on that 'root causes' paradigm.
How bad was it? Very bad indeed. The two charts below, about the rise in the number of people murdered in attacks inspired by the Muhammedan ideology, suffice to boggle the mind.

»
Figure 1

People who like to come up with the Sykes-Picot borders from WW I or the Iraq-invasion of 2003 as explanation for the murdering of thousands of men, women and children in Iraq and Syria these days, will have a hard time to explain the simultaneous spectacular growth of Muhammedan-inspired violence in Nigeria and many other countries while in Afghanistan the number of people being killed, decreased.
The second image shows the number of people killed in the top 25 countries, after sorting them on the total number of fatalities in the years 2010-2014 (column 7/8).

Figure 2.
image

The last column (9) is the most worrying. It gives the change in % of the number of victims in 2014 compared with the average number of victims in 2010-2013. So in 2014 the number of victims was 151% higher than the average number in the years 2010-2013.
In Nigeria the trend was worse, much worse, than in Iraq or Syria, but in China and several countries in Africa, notably Lybia, the CAR, the DRC and Cameroon the sharpness of the rise was even worse.

Terrorism, not terror
The spreadsheet that underlies these charts, is based on data collected by the indefatigable folks behind the website thereligionofpeace.com (TROP for short). In turn they get their unstructured data from news media. They are reliable, not perfect *) and they are conservative. Here is why I use the word 'conservative':
These are not incidents of ordinary crime involving nominal Muslims killing for money or vendetta. We only include incidents of deadly violence that are reasonably determined to have been committed out of religious duty - as interpreted by the perpetrator. Islam needs to be a motive, but it need not be the only factor.
We usually list only attacks resulting in loss of life (with a handful of exceptions). In several cases, the deaths are undercounted because deaths from trauma caused by the Islamists may occur in later days, despite the best efforts of medical personnel to keep the victims alive **).
In 2014, the BBC did a thorough analysis of Islamic terror attacks occurring during the month of November. They found 664 attacks and 5,042 deaths. Our list has only 284 attacks and 2,515 deaths for that month, meaning that we undercounted the true extent of Islamic terror by a significant margin.
We usually don't include incidents related to combat, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, unless it involves particularly heinous terror tactics, such as suicide bombings or attacks on troops sleeping in their barracks or providing medical care to the local population.
(quote from TROP website
Muhammedanism is a culture of threat. On numerous places in the Quran even 'the faithful' are denominated as 'the fearing'. So counting Muhammedan terror would give much higher numbers than these for Muhammedan-inspired terrorism. State-terror is excluded: so the hanging of homosexuals or stoning for adultery in Iran are not in the numbers. Nor the victims of Female Genital Mutilation – even of the terrifying type III at an age the girls will remember the ordeal.

Horrifying trend without silver linings
The charts presented here do not provide exact numbers of fatalities; unevitably they show, however, the horrifying trend: TROP did not change its way of collecting and representing their data.
No silver linings at all?
The trend for Somalia at first sight looks not that bad: the country dropped from 5th to 8th position from 2010 to 2014. Still in 2014 some 30% more people were killed than in 2013. And do not forget that the organized terrorists of that country are responsible for the huge rise in fatalities in neighboring Kenya.
For Russia and Dagestan 2014 was a good year with 'just' 7 and 17 people murdered.
In Pakistan (and Afghanistan) the number of people murdered in 2014 was about 45% lower than in 2013. Even this silver lining unfortunately has a very black lining around it: the TROP-data used did not include the last three weeks of december. So the Beslan-like slaughter of schoolchildren in Peshawar is not even included.
But there is the number of attacks around the world. That number was lower in 2014 than in 2013 and compared with 2010-2013 it rose 'just' 19%. I have to mention this not so-very-silver lining because of this article I wrote some two years ago:
Terrorism, terror and some statistics
In it I wrote about the trend from 2001-2010 and the trend from 1970-2010. According to another source than TROP (GTD) the number of 'incidents' quadrupled three times in the longer period:
The GTD graph strongly suggests the exponential change: in both the last two periods of 10 or 11 years the numbers quadrupled. Roughly the same goes for the first period.

The TROP-data for the period 2001 to 2007 showed that the number of people being killed, increased every year. From 2007 to 2010 that number decreased. The number of attacks, however, kept on growing.
For the last four years the situation was the inverse: a small growth of the number of attacks, a huge increase of the number of people killed per attack. A silver lining?

Notes
1) Link to source: A speech by Koenraad Elst
*) I came upon one attack in the 'country' Mogadishu and one in Scotland: I moved those to Somalia and the UK.
**) In my spreadsheet I left out the attacks with 'only injured'.

Frans Groenendijk  

Frans Groenendijk,  02-01-2015          

Reacties