Hundreds of Millions of Muslims Hate Jews, Support Terror: Dispelling the “Tiny Minority Myth”

Three miles from the tragedy in San Bernardino, people gathered to make sense of it all.  Just moments before, they heard a shooting had broken out…  they were scared.

“Saying all Muslims are evil is like looking at the Ku Klux Klan and saying all Christians are evil,” someone said.

It sounded good at the time, but it didn’t quite sit well with one of the women who’d been standing there.

Is that true?

It certainly is the prevailing sentiment of the time.  President Obama spent half of his address to the nation scolding Americans against Islamophobia, instead of offering real solutions to the threat.  If you listened to the President and to the rhetoric on television, you’d think that there’s a tiny minority of hate-filled Muslims tarnishing the reputations of the peace-loving majority.

Sadly, that’s a lie.

Of course, not all Muslims are hateful.  At Patheos, we have a Muslim Channel run by a Muslim editor I’d call a friend. Farouk Peru, for example, is publicly wrestling with the problems in their faith in a post called, “How Can Muslims Proactively Combat or Guard Against Extremists?”  But, as the President lectures us about islamophobia, we must look at the facts…  and — be warned — they are startling.  David French, at National Review, has the startling facts.

1. Muslims Overwhelmingly Hate Jews

French writes about a 2014 Anti-Defamation League poll of over fifty thousand people in over a hundred countries.  The staggering numbers are hard to digest, especially after all of the President’s soothingly politically correct words.  “A full 74% of North African and Middle Eastern residents registered anti-Semitic beliefs, including 92 percent of Iraqis, a whopping 69 percent of relatively secular Turks, and 74 percent of Saudis,” he writes.  “A solid majority – 61 percent – of majority-Muslim Malays harbor anti-Semitic attitudes, while only 13 percent of neighboring majority-Buddhist Thais are anti-Jewish”

2.  Hundreds of Millions of Muslims Support Killing Those Who Leave Islam

French writes, “Collectively… hundreds of millions of men and women support capital punishment for the exercise of the basic human rights of freedom of expression and free exercise of religion” across several countries. According to the Washington Post, for example, “88% of Muslims in Egypt and 62% of Muslims in Pakistan favor the death penalty for people who leave the Muslim religion.”  Before you get comfortable in dismissing percentages, remember that Egypt has 80 million Muslims… of which 88% believe in the death penalty for leaving the faith.

3.  Hundreds of Millions of Muslims Sympathize with Terrorists

Here’s a very slight glimmer of slightly okay news: most Muslims reject ISIS.  But, “extrapolating from the populations of polled countries alone shows that roughly 50 million people express sympathy for a terrorist army that burns prisoners alive, throws gay men from buildings, and beheads political opponents. In Pakistan a horrifying 72 percent couldn’t bring themselves to express an unfavorable view of ISIS.”

And if that isn’t enough to make you want to crawl back into the bed, here are three more sobering facts:

1.  In Britain, more Muslims join ISIS than join the British army.

2. In Saudi Arabia, anti-Israel terrorism is so popular that a telethon once raised $100 million to support the Intifada.

3.  “Between Boko Haram, the Al-Nusra front, ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas, al Qaeda, the Taliban, Yemeni militias, Libyan militias, and many others, the number of active jihadists numbers in the hundreds of thousands, with some estimates of more than 100,00 fighting in Syria alone,” French writes.

Non-Muslims can’t fix what’s wrong with Islam.  While I’m touched by the folks over on the Muslim Channel who are delving into the hard truths and trying to come up with suitable answers, what do we do as a nation?

French ends by saying, “It is Muslims’ responsibility to reform their own faith. It is America’s responsibility to defend itself and its citizens. Neither goal is advanced by telling convenient, politically-correct lies. After fourteen years of war, can we finally tell the truth?”
Buy Sarah Palin’s new book  Sweet Freedom, in bookstores everywhere!

Read more on the Patheos Faith and Family Channel!