“The majority of Muslims aren’t waiting to see which side is the most tolerant or which side takes in the most refugees; they are waiting to see which side is winning.”
“The Vast Majority Myth,” by William Kilpatrick, Crisis Magazine, December 15, 2015:
We often hear it said that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and reject violence. That proposition is worth examining because if it’s not true there is cause to worry. Of course, you should be worried already. Even if only a small percentage of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are prepared to use violence, that still works out to a large number. However, if the vast-majority thesis doesn’t hold up, you might want to order a Kevlar vest from Amazon, or, if you’re the accommodating type, you could start practicing the Shahada—the Islamic declaration of faith.
There is a good deal of polling data to suggest that the vast majority of Muslims are not just your standard-issue vast majority. For example, Pew polls of public opinion in Pakistan and Egypt show that the vast majority (about 82 percent) favor stoning for adultery, amputation for theft, and death for apostates. So, even if a majority in these countries are not personally inclined to violence, they have no problem with the violent application of sharia law.
But rather than rely on polling data, let’s look at some other ways of assessing the “vast majority” proposition. For some perspective, here are some other “vast majority” propositions that just popped into my head:
Proposition 1. The vast majority of people are peaceful until they’re not.
Proposition 2. The vast majority of people go with the flow.
Proposition 3. The majority of people in any society are women and children.
With the exception of the third proposition, there is no empirical evidence for these propositions, but they seem just as reasonable as the proposition that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful—a supposition which also has no empirical support. However, Proposition 3 does lend credence to the “vast majority of Muslims” thesis since women and children are, for various reasons, less inclined to violence than adult males. It would therefore be reasonable to say of any society that at least a majority are peaceful.
But people who are peaceful today will not necessarily be peaceful tomorrow. It’s probably safe to say that the vast majority of Hutus were behaving peacefully before the Rwanda genocide of 1994 … and then they stopped behaving peacefully. Using clubs, machetes, and, occasionally, guns, the Hutu managed to kill about 800,000 Tutsi in the space of one hundred days. It’s likely that the vast majority did not take part in the killings, but, by all accounts, a sizeable number did, and an even greater number were complicit. According to reports, most of the Tutsi victims who lived in rural villages were murdered by their neighbors.
So, in line with Proposition 1, the majority of the Hutu were peaceful until they were not. And, in line with Proposition 2, the majority of the Hutu went with the flow—the flow, in this case, being in the direction of mayhem. It should be noted, however, that there were powerful incentives to go with the flow. Moderate Hutus who declined to join in the killing were often killed by their fellow Hutus as a warning to others.
Although women took part in the slaughter, Proposition 3 would suggest that the majority of them did not. And if you combine the women with the children, the elderly, and the moderates, it is reasonable to assume that the majority of Hutu did not participate in the carnage. That, however, would have been small comfort to the Tutsi. The more you think about it, the less comforting it is to know that the vast majority of any population won’t take up arms against you.
History is full of examples of peoples and nations who were peaceful and then were not. Prior to World War I, the vast majority of Europeans were behaving peacefully. Then came 1914, and the European nations went to war with each other. The majority, of course, remained at home and were never involved in battle, but it seems safe to say that most of them fully backed their own side in the conflict and welcomed news of enemy casualties.
Given the right circumstances, the majority of almost any population will willingly put itself on a war footing and turn their homeland into a home front. The questions is, is there something about Islamic cultures that make them more susceptible to warlike attitudes more of the time?
Before attempting an answer, let’s briefly consider another historical example—the Spartans. Were the vast majority of Spartans peaceful? In the sense that the great majority, including women, children, and the elderly were not at war all the time, yes. Still, we would be mistaken to call them a peaceful people. Sparta was a warrior culture, and it cultivated a warrior mentality in its citizens.
The Spartans were a unique case, but in so far as Islam has a tendency, it tends in the direction of Sparta rather than, say, in the direction of Sweden—a land which was once host to a warrior culture of its own. But the Vikings are long gone, and their peaceful descendants look like they will be the first European nation to fall to Islam—a culture which has been more or less at war with the rest of the world since its inception.
Why is the sharia penalty for apostasy death? Because Islam understands itself to be an army. And the penalty for deserting an army in wartime is death. But for Islam, all times are wartimes. The basic division in the Islamic faith is between the House of Islam and the House of War. The essential mission given to Muslims is to bring the House of War (all non-Islamic nations) under the control of the House of Islam.
Like the Spartans, the first Muslims were warriors. Their leader was both a prophet and a warlord. Since Muslims are still expected to model their behavior on Muhammad, it’s not surprising that Muslim cultures will be more prone to violence than, say, cultures that take Jesus or Buddha as their inspiration. Our own culture is completely sold on the importance of having role models to emulate, but hasn’t yet grasped the consequences that follow when 1.6 billion people take Muhammad as their primary role model. Indeed, one of the chief appeals of ISIS and company is their promise to return Islam to those glorious days when Muhammad spread the faith by force.
It may well be that a great many Muslims today just want to be left alone to go about their business. But one of the built-in features of Islam is that, if you’re a Muslim, it won’t leave you alone. It wants to force you to be good. However, the only way to know if you’re good is if you conform to sharia. Thus, where Islam is practiced in its purest form, the virtue police patrol the streets, and everyone understands that if they convert to another religion they can be executed for apostasy—that is to say, desertion.
This is where the second proposition comes in: the vast majority of people go with the flow. The flow of Islam today has returned to its historical channel. It flows in the direction of militancy. Many of the secular governments in the Muslim world have been overthrown, or are in danger of falling to militant theocrats. The caliphate has been re-established in the form of the Islamic State, and the combined might of Russia and the Western powers has been unable to defeat it. Moreover, the seeming impotence of the West is matched by its decadence, and, according to your local imam, the two go together. The current parlous state of the West is just the sort of punishment that Allah visits on those who ignore his laws.
Imagine that you’re one of those moderately disposed Muslims who just wants to go about his own business. You look around and see that all the predictions of the more militant mullahs and imams are coming true. You want to be left alone, but you also want to be a good Muslim. And more and more it seems that being a good Muslim is what the militants say it is. After all, they can buttress their case with dozens of passages from Islamic scripture. And even if you’re not inwardly persuaded, there are still those outside pressures to be considered. Just as the extremist Hutu killed off the moderate Hutu, so also, extremist Muslims have a habit of murdering moderate Muslims who won’t go along with the program. After a while, the radical position won’t seem so radical. In fact, it will start to make sense….
Islam_Macht_Frei says
I often point out that most Klansmen never lynched anyone, and most Nazis never stuffed anyone into a gas chamber.
Just as those facts do not exculpate Nazism and Klanism, “peaceful” Muslims tell us nothing about the nature of Islam.
mortimer says
Most high-ranking Nazis were refined gentlemen, such the 6 PhD lawyers on the panel of the Wannsee Conference which kickstarted the industrial genocide of the Holocaust.
Similarly, most high-ranking Islamists are refined, Western-educated gentlemen who believe in the MASTER RELIGION THEORY which gives Muslims, such as they, the right, obligation and duty to abuse ‘disbelievers’ (kufaar).
65% of all Muslims worldwide agree with the two main programs of ISIS: 1) strict Sharia law and 2) a universal caliphate.
15% of all Muslims agree with William Kilpatrick that ‘a good Muslim is a militant Muslim’. That’s one in six or as many as 300 million jihad-terror supporters.
BC says
Maybe refined according to their own standards but sociopaths none the less. Goering was addicted to morphine I believe, Hitler was on amphetamines. Probably many of them were on something.
PrayerWarrior says
“The vast majority of people are peaceful until they’re not.” I thought the Hutu-Tutsi analogy very appropriate. A lot depends on the reason why a people remain peaceful. Another analogy is the Rosewood “massacre” in Florida in the 1920’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewood_massacre A genuine episode of racism.
On a given day, a whole town of peaceful white people got up and decided on “the destruction and permanent removal of an African American community of between 18 and 22 households” And it was done. They may have been (somewhat) peaceful before then, but they were also hateful. And that brought about a day when they would no longer be peaceful. And it was the same for the Hutu, with skin color not being the issue.
So the real question is not “are the vast majority of Muslims peaceful?”, but are the vast major of Muslims hateful?” The Koran, as interpreted by the chronology of the hadiths, demands that they should be.
Wiser Monkeys says
Please bear in mind the research that found only 10% of a group need be zealots for their view to inevitably dominate the whole group:
http://freakonomics.com/2011/07/28/minority-rules-why-10-percent-is-all-you-need
This figure is certainly interesting when you look at Muslims’ opinion data, summarized by us for the UK here:
http://wisermonkeys.uk/muslimopinion.html
And if you hope that the younger generation are better assimilated and hence more moderate, you’d better think again:
http://wisermonkeys.uk/muslimopinion.html#young
P0rkCh0ps says
Minority rules is an interesting article particularly this comment – a committed minority can drive the entire conversation. This is exactly what we see with the liberal progressives pushing the nonsense of ‘religion of peace’ and ‘the vast majority’. The opposition to this nonsense is still less than 10 percent. I believe the opposition is gaining ground and will win provided we remain committed.
Wiser Monkeys says
Thank you for your reply. As you say, the opposition is firming up, but the key is to remain committed. We’re trying to provide more facts and figures to substantiate the arguments.
PRCS says
Every so-called Muslim “radical/extremist” was a moderate Muslim at some time in their lives.
mortimer says
Radical Islamic Chic is now prevalent among Muslim youth, so I disagree they start ‘moderate’.
PRCS says
To what degree? At what age? In what geographical region?
Prevalent, but not universal.
Were they moderates before their introduction to “Radical Islamic Chick”?
You disagreed about how long the raised index finger has been in use, too:
http://tinyurl.com/jonx37p Besayev:
http://tinyurl.com/zw2xytj Killed 2006
http://tinyurl.com/ztgym78 Abu Hafs al-Urduni: Killed 2006
Long before the establishment of the Islamic State
PRCS says
Prevalent but not universal.
And no Muslim kid is a “radical/extremist” from birth.
Mo says
@ PRCS
“And no Muslim kid is a “radical/extremist” from birth.”
First of all, no one is any religion “from birth”. An infant is not capable of understanding any religion, much less choosing to practice it.
But to the point, so what? In comparison to any civilization founded upon ideals such as human rights, just rule of law, and equal treatment under that law, Islam is already radical and extremist.
So I will ask you the same question I’ve been asking for a while now, and to which I never get a response:
Where is this overwhelming majority of peaceful/moderate Muslims? Where are they, protesting in every country on earth (or at least where they are free to do so) against the endless savagery being committed by their coreligionists?
Since there are so many of them, we should be seeing them by the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands.
Where are they?
PRCS says
Read the article, Mo.
Screeminmeeme says
I agree. Islam has been hi-jacked…..not by ”radicals”, but by ”moderates” who, practicing taqiyya, have successfully fooled the world into believing the lie that they are the majority and therefore, harmless.
What a fool the West is to acquiesce and capitulate to the most vile, sadistic ideology that a diabolical madman has ever come up with. And what a shame.
mccode says
Excellent article, Mr Kilpatrick.
Islam’s horrific role model of ‘perfection’ should be enough, when objectively scrutinized by any rational person, to be evidence of a perverted and sick ideology.
Unfortunately, by far too many persons are not rational.
yohanan says
Very good article. However, I disagree that adult women are, “for various reasons, less inclined to violence than adult males.” Women can be no less mean. In the evolutionary balance of power between the human sexes, the so-called weaker sex is said to enjoy a subtle slyness which compensates for smaller size and muscle mass. There seems no lack of female jihadis, including mothers of jihadists.
Annak says
If the vast majority of muslims believe their prophet is the ” perfect man” then they just can’t be moderates, considering there is no ” moderation ” in Mohammad’s words/actions,
The only muslims who are peaceful are the children under 8-12 years old depending where they are raised.
Dave J says
When you consider that In Islam jihad is not optional, it is the duty of every Muslim, and so is migration (Hijra) for the specific cause of spreading Islam, then “Houston, we have a problem”. Actually hundreds of thousands of problems.
Islam is designed to be reform-proof and as the writer says, death for leaving the cause is the strategy of an army, not a religion.
Davegreybeard says
Actually, this 10% thing is quite good news and should encourage all of us in the Counter- Jihad.
We only need to convince 10% of our fellow Infidels to accept the truth about Muhammad and Islam.
Look at it this way; how many of us will become “uncommitted” to the project of spreading the word of Muhammad – I’d say zero to extremely few. On the other hand, many of us convince our fellow Kuffar that there is something rotten in Islam, on a regular basis – we are advancing the cause every day.
So be of good cheer fellow Infidels, only 10% and we got it!
Deus Vult
dumbledoresarmy says
EXACTLY.
That’s *my* ‘takeaway’.
The ‘ten percent committed can make all the difference’ should give HUGE hope to the Resistance.
Because in many places we’re *already* cracking the ‘ten percent’.
Geert Wilders’ party has *MORE* than ten percent of the vote in the Netherlands. Swedish Democrats and Danish People’s Party are getting there.
This time around, in these dark days of the Third Jihad, because of the internet and social media acting as a ‘force multiplier’, I think that the ultimate pushback will be far more grounded, much more coming from the very depths and breadth of the threatened Infidel societies, than ever before. *More* of us will know *exactly* why we are fighting. We *know* the Enemy.
So we keep on keeping on! Every little bit helps. Every conversation, every link, every post, every letter to every politician, every donation to an Islamoresistant political party or politician…it all helps.
Sursum corda!
DP111 says
Muslim immigrants are the most unique immigrants in the world.
No immigrants anywhere anytime, are so desperate to get into Christian countries, as they are. They will beg, cheat, forge, hike over mountains, cross dangerous seas, and barge through barbed wire, to get into the country, knowing full well that the country they want to get into, does not want them. They have no shame or sense of personal honour.
Once inside using lies and crookedness, they start to cook up plots to destroy the country that gave them sanctuary – bombs, knifings and bullets. Or Benefit fraud Jihad.
It is not the Jihadis that are the existential threat, but the so called moderates. Once these moderate Muslims are a majority, we will have Sharia by the democratic will of the majority.
JIMJFOX says
Great article and good comments.
Just a small point- these muslim “Immigrants” are not immigrants- they have made
no application to immigrate and are in fact illegal invaders.
This is the latest weasel word of the MSM- more ‘respectable’ than say, ‘refugees’.
JIMJFOX says
Who is the ‘enemy’??
When the war starts your first opponents will be your government instrumentalities-
police, national guard and eventually the armed forces. Unless a policy reversal
admits the truth that Islam has stated publicly their aim to conquer the Dar al-Harb.
Al Fabeech says
Great article! Interesting viewpoint. (I’ve noticed that certain articles bring out mostly unproductive, venomous, name calling remarks, making this site look like just what it’s accused of, “Islamophobia”. Did you notice this article brought out only thoughtful, respectful remarks instead?”)
Thomas Pirotka says
Wonderful article! Thank you! I even had to smile at the way you made your point though it is sad and terrible at the same time…
silasozzie says
“the peaceful majority are irrelevant” Brigitte Gabriel