We often hear in the media in America,
"Oh my god, Muslims, watch out." Uh,
terrorists, uh, their religion is not
like the other religion, a religion of
peace. Of course not. Don't be
ridiculous, right? I mean, these guys
are far more inclined towards violence
than other religions. Well, that's
interesting. UC Berkeley, a political
scientist, uh, M. Steven Fish, decided,
hey, you know what? Why don't I check
that out? See if that's true. Now,
there's a lot of different ways that you
can judge this. And there's a lot of
different metrics you can use, but he
thought, why not look at the murder
rates in Muslim countries and non-Muslim
countries and see how they relate. I
mean, if there's something intrinsic to
the religion of Islam that leads to
violence, it might not just show itself
in terms of terrorism or wars. And
remember, it's not like the Muslims
started the war in Iraq. We started the
war in Iraq, right? And then a lot of
violence broke out. But murder is a
different category. It's, you know,
intentional homicide and it's judged
based on crime statistics. So, let's
check that out. Okay. I thought that's
an interesting idea. So, he explains
predominantly Muslim countries average
2.4 murders perom per 100,000 people
compared to 7.5 in non-Muslim countries.
What the percentage of the society that
is made up of Muslims is an
extraordinarily good predictor of a
country's murder rate.
So, get a load of this. More Muslims
equals less
murder. Uh, Republicans, conservatives,
all you, everybody in the media, go
ahead. This is the time when your head
explodes and not due to
Muslims. No way, man. I don't believe
it. Oh, facts suck. I No way. I read a
poll today. They like to have the
women's heads covered. No. No. Yeah.
Okay, that's all interesting, right? But
these are the numbers. You can go check
them yourself. Okay. So, the non-Muslim
countries have murder rates three times
higher. So, now I know what a lot of
smart people are thinking. Wait a
minute. Now, there's a lot of different
factors that go into that. You're right.
So, let's just read up on the rest of
the context of this and then we'll talk
about it. He says, "More authorit
authoritarianism in Muslim countries
does not account for the difference. I
have found that controlling for
political regime and statistical
analysis does not change the findings.
More Muslims, less homicide. See,
because if I I would have thought the
same thing. Hey, look, a lot of these
countries uh unfortunately are under
authoritarian leadership and now if you
got a guy uh who's a dictator and who's
going to, you know, have severe
consequences for you, if there's crime,
maybe that affects the numbers. But he
controlled for that and he found that it
does not affect the numbers. Okay. Um,
how about uh if you took out some of the
troublesome Christian countries? There
are countries, by the way, when they're
troublesome, they're not called
Christian countries. They are countries
that happen to be Christian, right? But
there's huge murder rates in some of
those countries. So, he thought of that.
He said, "Fish further fleshed out uh
these findings, for example, by
rerunning the numbers to exclude
non-Muslim majority states with
extraordinarily high murder rates.
Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala,
Honduras, Jamaica, Lassto, South Africa,
and Venezuela. Countries with lots of
Muslims were still less murder by a
pretty large margin. Okay. Now, do I
believe that there is something inherent
in Muslim people that makes them less
violent than other homo
sapiens? Of course not.
That argument is as absurd as saying
that Muslims are inherently more
violent. No, they're human beings.
They're exactly the same as the rest of
us. Now, could there be something uh
that is in their culture, the
socioeconomic conditions, political
context that's making the difference?
Yes. Now, that's exactly what I say also
about terrorism that it might have
something to do with the political
context, the socioeconomic conditions,
etc. and all that should be studied
further. Okay. But the idea that Muslims
are inherently more violent in general
is
counterfactual. It is the opposite of
true. Okay. So now again, it's not to
say that Muslims are lovely people who
float up on clouds and who have a
different makeup than we do, okay? And
who would never do anything wrong. Of
course, there's still murders. It's not
at the same rate. And there's got to be
other explanations for it. But the idea
that Muslims are more violent is just
not only irrational, but just simply not
true. It does not comport with the facts
as we have them. So for all of you guys
who wanted to consider the Muslims are
the worst of the worst, I guess that's a
sad day for you. You'll have to go find
another group to single out and go, "No,
no, no, but those are the really, really
bad