Entertainer Russell Brand takes to the pages of the Huffington Post to reassure his countrymen and us that the men who murdered the off-duty English soldier in broad daylight on the streets of Woolwich were insane:
After my Hitler Tweet I got involved in a bit of back and forth with a few people who said stuff like “the murderer said himself he did it for Islam.” Although I wouldn’t dismiss what he’s saying entirely, I think he forfeited the right to have his views received unthinkingly when he murdered a stranger in the street. Someone else regarding my tweet said, “Hitler’s moustache didn’t invent an ideology that sanctions murder.” That is thankfully true but Islam when practiced by normal people does not advocate violence. “People all over the world are killing in the name of Islam,” someone added. This is the most tricky bit to understand. What I think is that all over our country – all over our planet – there are huge numbers of people who feel alienated and sometimes victimized by the privileged and the powerful, whether that’s rich people, powerful corporations or occupying nations. They feel that their interests are not being represented and, in many cases, know that their friends and families are being murdered by foreign soldiers. I suppose people like that may look to their indigenous theology for validation and to sanctify their, to some degree understandable, feelings of rage.
Rage = insanity?
Comfortable belief sometimes runs afoul of reality. In the most recent and reliable survey of worldwide opinion among Muslims, opinion on whether suicide bombing of civilians is justified in defense of Islam varies between 1% in Azerbaijan to a substantial 40% in the Palestinian territories. In Afghanistan the number so believing is 39%; in Indonesia, the country with the largest number of Muslims, the number is 7%.
I would speculate that the number of Muslims who believe that attacks on soldiers in defense of Islam is higher than those who believe that attacks on civilians are so justified. Unfortunately, Pew Research didn’t ask that in their survey so any conjecture I might venture would just be speculation.
Without sitting down to do the math, let’s just pull a number out of thin air. If just 10% of Muslims worldwide think that suicide attacks on civilians are justified in defense of Islam, something I think any reasonable person would construe as advocating violence for that purpose, and there are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world today, that makes 100 million Muslims who advocate violence in the name of Islam.
That’s a lot of crazy people.
