LogFAQs > #886336184

omnichaos posted...

A key factor here is accounting for population, of which the Muslim population of the US is around 1%. What percentage of the US population is white?

a) If you're going to ask what percentage of the US population is white, you'd best be counting all crime committed by whites. Otherwise the correct question to ask would be "what proportion of the US populace are white supremacists" (the answer being difficult to quantify with any accuracy, but almost certainly less than the number of Muslims judging by the number of hate groups currently operational [approximately 900]).

b) In both groups in America - whites and Muslims - the proportion of those who become terrorists are so exponentially small as to effectively be statistical outliers. Your odds of dying to a terrorist, Islamic or White Nationalist, are incredibly remote - less than plane crashes, drowning in a bathtub, or getting killed by a fucking deer (Deer kill about 130 people a year, which is more than terrorists managed every year this century other than 2001). Even in 2001 - a major outlier, for obvious reasons - your odds of dying to an Islamic terrorist were roughly on par with being mauled to death by a dog or dying in an Earthquake. The overwhelming majority of both groups are peaceful and law-abiding, which not only makes statistical analysis difficult (because with such a small sample size, even normal statistical flux can dramatically skew results), but on a more practical note it makes it pretty stupid to try and lump everyone together with a minuscule number of assholes. All whites are not that prick who ran over Heather Heyer; by the same token, all Muslims are not Osama bin Laden.

c) It doesn't matter anyways, because your question was asking why people get more freaked out about white supremacists than Islamic extremists, and you were trying to suggest that Islamic extremism is the greater threat. Both of those rely on raw number of crimes, not proportionality. Even if you want to suggest that a greater proportion of Muslims are Islamic Extremists than whites are White Supremacists (a blatant false equivalence, but I'll humour you), that doesn't in any way make Islamic Extremism a greater threat. If I started a new organization composed of me and four other people and those four people all turned out to be mass murderers, the fact that 80% of my organization's adherents committed mass terror doesn't make it the greatest threat the nation is currently facing.
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!