I'll try my best to get through to you, Anti-Hatemonger

Submitted by Noah Wilk (United States), May 9, 2007 at 18:35

Anti-Hatemonger, I will try to explain this to you in the simplest possible manner, though how you don't get this is beyond me, considering how many times I and others have explained it.

Antihatemonger wrote:

"I remember when around 25,000 people protested against the Pope in Istanbul, many anti-Turkish, anti-Muslim people were seeing this as representative of the whole country"

This part is simple. They were all Muslims. Every last one of them. They wanted to murder a man simply because he quoted a man who criticized Islam a few hundred years ago. It showed the world precisely how barbaric Muslims are when they take it upon themselves to feel "offended" over some silly non-issue. This is a legitimate criticism, because you never see 25,000 Muslims protesting the acts of cowardly terrorists who blow up cafes full of innocent, unarmed women and children.

The fact that tens of thousands of Muslims will gather to call for the murder of a man for quoting someone but will never gather in any number to condemn their own clerics who call for the death of others simply for having a different belief system should evoke some sort of cognitive dissonance in you.

"now pro-secularist protests around the country have taken place, protests by hundreds of thousands of people-over a million in Istanbul alone-they are trying to downplay this."

Where are you getting those numbers, for starters? I read that it was only 500,000 in all of Turkey. Where are you getting a million people protesting in Istanbul alone? Five hundred thousand people would account for just 0.7% of all the people in Turkey. Note that I said "of all people" as opposed to "of all Muslims", because Turkey has 142,000 Christians and Jews. So it was 0.7% of the general population, but perhaps just 0.5% or 0.6% of the Muslim population.

In other words, most likely there was s significant portion of the Jewish or Christian populace out protesting, but 99.5% of all Muslims in Turkey did not protest. That is not a movement. It is an aberration, a glitch in the data, a statistically meaningless anomoly.

I for one am not downplaying it. I am merely stating the facts. And the facts are that this is not evidence of a moderate movement when only a tiny fraction of a percent of Muslims there protested. It is an aberration, not a movement. This is nothing to get excited or hopeful about. It is certainly nothing to bet the future of our civilization on!

And looking at the big deal the Denialists are raising over Karachi, they fail to address the fact that Karachi has 400,000 Catholics, Christians, and Hindus living there, and there were only 100,000 protesters total. So again, the vast majority were Christian, Catholic, and Hindu, not Muslim. This is being grossly misrepresented by the Denialist crowd as a "Muslim protest" when very few if any protesters were Muslim.

"an islamic rally by 25,000 people represents the country, but pro secular ones by hundreds of thousands of people don't?"

Again, in Karachi it was mainly Catholics, Christians and Hindus protesting, not Muslims. In Turkey, if not a single non-Muslim protested and all 500,000 who attended were Muslim, that still means that 99.3% of all Muslims there did not stand up to oppose Sharia, while just 0.7% did. This is not something to get excited about. This is how it has been since Islam was founded. A few aberrations. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along!

Finally, just because they do not personally want Sharia law does not mean that they do not hate the USA and plot against us. Jordan and Egypt are both supposedly secular Islamic countries that do not subscribe to Sharia law, and yet their hatred for all things American, Jewish, or Western in general is almost beyond compare! So equating not wanting Sharia law with not hating America or the West is erroneous, dishonest, and delusional.

"Can anyone explain the logic behind this?"

I just spelled it out for you. It's up to you whether you choose to accept the facts I state or not, but that does not change the fact that I am right, since I am dealing with reality.

---

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".