Uncensored Interview re: Muslims & terrorism in the world by Deepak Chopra (WELL WORTH READING IMHO)

[BigBearJohn]

"Here is my analysis of it." He said. "There are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world. That's about 25% of the world's population. By no means are the majority of these people violent or fundamentalists either."

Chopra, who is a senior scientist at Gallup, was part of a team that conducted a poll of 600 million Muslims (about half of the Muslim population of the world). Countries polled included Pakistan, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. What he concluded in the poll is that the vast majority (92-95%) of Muslims are moderates, and they admire the West for their entrepreneurship, business and modernism. A small minority (<5%) are extremists, and of that we don't know how many are actual terrorists. His guess is very few.

Based on the survey, the cause of terrorism is "a rage that comes from humiliation, lack of respect, and also from factors that we are unaware of, generally uneducated about."

He cites Wikipedia estimates of the number of people that have died in Iraq since the war, ranging from 400,000 to over a million. "When we initiated the war on Iraq we forget to remind ourselves that the Iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11. Nothing to do with 9/11. We also know that the Iraqis had no weapons of mass destruction. We now say that Saddam Hussein was a mass murderer. That he used torture and that he needed to be out. We should remind ourselves that we knew this a long time ago and we have used him as our ally for a long time. He was in the senior Bush administration before the first war. You know, much before that... And then we decided to make him our enemy. Nothing changed. He was definitely a mass murderer. He was a torturer. When we did the 'Shock and Awe' campaign. The 'Shock and Awe.' Listen to the words. We're bombing Baghdad and many parts of the country we're calling it the 'Shock and Awe' campaign."

"FOX News actually produced the Shock and Awe campaign as a theatrical production. They hired a musical director. They had symphonic music. And when you saw it on TV it was a glorious, glorious attempt to liberate the people of Iraq. It's easy for a person sitting in a plane 32,000 feet above sea level to press a button. When he looks at the map he presses a button. And you know, we're seeing it on screens. We're calling it 'Shock and Awe' and we hear this beautiful music - sounds almost like Mozart - while this is happening, while on the ground there are grizzly scenes which we don't see in the media, of people being mutilated. People in the throes of death. Bodies all over the place. And gruesome scenes the American public is totally unaware of, but people in the Muslim world are very aware of... We are very self-absorbed."

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An illuminating article well worth reading:

CLICK-HERE

[lapfog_1]

1. I sure hope he is wrong on the numbers

Because 5% of 1.8 billion is still 90 million "extremists" which is roughly about the same as the number of households in the United States. Even if 1 in 100 "extremists" becomes a terrorist, that would be 900,000 terrorists roaming the world.

Maybe the phrase "Bring 'em on" should be retracted? :sarcasm:

[silverojo]

2. That's just what I was thinking

Except my calculator didn't have enough digits to do the actual math.

That's way too many extremists out there....

And as far as "gruesome scenes" go, 9/11 wasn't exactly the stuff of which Disney movies are made.

I'm not saying the war on Iraq was right...just saying that Chopra needs to be a little more sensitive about those who perished on 9/11. After all, it's not just Muslims who grieve the loss of the loved ones who die in senseless attacks.

[DerekJ]

4. 5% with extremist views, not terrorist views.

[Stevepol]

3. He's using "extremists" in the same way we'd use the term "fundamentalist."

Among our Christian population, the fundamentalists number well over 5%, but they're certainly not all lunatics and KKK.

Same applies to Muslim extremism vs terrorism.

[lapfog_1]

5. Yeah, but I happen to think that 1 out of 100 of our "fundies"

are truly batshit crazy, and, with the right conditions (no job, no education, no future) could easily join the stormfront Timothy McVeigh types. Problem is, a great deal of the Islamic world HAS those conditions ( and we could be joining them very shortly ).

All you have to do is look as some of the people in the "Sarah Palin" crowds.