h/t -- Sullivan (which means, a tip of the hat to Andrew Sullivan, whose blog is where I came across this content -- a nice informal way of giving credit to your sources). The diagram itself apparently was original posted at a site called Get Religion and while I believe the number of American Muslims is overstated, the point stands. The extremists control the debate, at our peril.
4 comments:
This diagram shows the fact that the minority is more vocal then the silent majority. The opinion of such a small amount of people controls the debate and ideas that are presented to us.
It is very nice to see statistics put in this perspective. It truly shows how ignorant many are in regards to the Muslim population as a whole. Many tend to jump to the assumption that all Muslims are like those who attacked the World Trade Center or like those that "pose a threat" to America. As can be seen in this diagram, categorizing can be dangerous, because (as shown), extremists only represent a small part of the whole. This not only accounts for the Muslim Population. It can be noticed that the Quran burners only represent a very, very small population of America. And yet, many Islamic extremists assume that these people are representative of the American people. And unfortunately, they do tend up representing us as such because the minority is consistently more vocal than the "silent majority," as Cris mentioned in his post.
It is such a shame that people do not do their research and note statistics that truly compare the majority to the minority such as this chart before jumping to conclusions.
Although Madison was primarily concerned with the detrimental effects of majority factions, this Venn diagram goes to accentuate the potentially disastrous ramifications of minority factions and stereotypes. Quaran burners and Al Qaeda operatives make up less than 0.0001% of the corresponding populations and yet are among the first things that come to mind when we begin to think of either side of the conflict. This is quite a bitter commentary of our modern, lazy, and hedonistic world. Society allows the media's capitalistic and sensationalist agenda to reign supreme at the expense of peace and reason. Furthermore, the masses show a lack of initiative and allow themselves to be spun by others with more sinister motives than just informing the public. As a society, we must be discriminating and we must not allow ourselves to impulsively act upon the self-interested agendas of our politicians and news agencies. We can no longer afford to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people and waste billions of taxpayer dollars in the name of contrived problems .
Looking at this diagram, it becomes quite apparent that the paranoia many had towards the Muslim faith in America, mostly after the 9/11 attacks, was unreasonably directed in the way that it made the entire Muslim population appear to be associated with the extremists that committed the atrocities against the United States. A few people of a particular religion committing crimes against humanity do not constitute us in viewing the entire religious population in the same way we view those that actually did wrong. As illustrated in the diagram, those who are of the Muslim faith form a population consisting of 1.57 billion people, and those who are associated with Al Qaeda and other terrorists groups number around ten thousand. A quick calculation shows that the number of extremists in the world make up 0.0006% of the actually population of Islamic believers, a number that reveals the silliness and nonsense of those who view all Muslims in the same way they view those who were actual threats to the security of the nation. Making cursory assumptions about a group of people without looking at the reality of things only fuels the fire of distrust.
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