As of 2010, there were 1.57 billion Muslims in the world, making Islam the second largest religion worldwide. The combined forces of Islamic State, Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda constitute only .003 percent of the worldwide Muslim population. And despite the fact that most Muslims are integral parts of our communities with no intent to harm us, there are many people who still believe that all Muslims are inherently bad and dangerous, which is simply an ill-informed and blatantly false generalization. If Islam legitimately bred terror, nearly all of us would be dead by now.
An FBI study examining terrorism in the United States from 1980 to 2005 found that 94 percent of terror attacks were carried out by non-Muslims. As of 2014, in the time since the 9/11 attacks, Muslim-linked terrorism had claimed the lives of only 37 Americans. During the same time period, over 190,000 Americans were murdered in violent crimes. The 9/11 attacks stick out in our minds because of the immense number of casualties they caused. However, Islam is not the reason almost 3,000 people died that day. Yes, the attacks were brutally violent and terrible, and we should certainly condemn those who carried them out, but we cannot blame them on an entire religion based on the actions of a few hateful individuals.
According to a study by the New America Foundation, white Americans are the biggest terror threat in the United States. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed in terror attacks by white supremacists, anti-government fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims. Of the 26 attacks the group defined as terror, 19 of them were executed by non-Muslims.
We are quick to label attacks carried out by Muslims as terrorism, but we hesitate to do the same for those carried out by people with other beliefs. If all Muslims are terrorists, does that mean that all white Christians hold the beliefs of the Ku Klux Klan or the Westboro Baptist Church? What about the extremist Buddhist monks and their followers who killed hundreds of Muslim civilians in Burma in 2013? Do they represent their entire religion? And we can’t forget about the Jewish terrorists in Israel who attacked Palestinian civilians and vandalized mosques and Christian churches in 2013. They surely do not represent Judaism as a whole.
As University of California, Riverside professor Reza Aslan said in an interview with CNN: “Islam doesn’t promote violence or peace. Islam is just a religion, and like every religion in the world, it depends on what you bring to it. If you’re a violent person, your Islam, your Judaism, your Christianity, your Hinduism is going to be violent…. People are violent or peaceful. And that depends on their politics, their social world, the way that they see their communities [and] the way they see themselves.”
ISIS is not Islam. Terrorism has no religion, and religion does not breed terror. It is dangerous to condemn an entire group for the actions of a few. This unjustified hate only fills the world with further violence, prejudice and discrimination.
– By Becca Heilman