So what has inspired me to write this thread? I'm sure you all saw the news yesterday, after yet another Islamic Jihadi attack came to fruition, but this wasn't the reason I wrote this thread. Nor was it the reason, that on Saturday just past, I stood in the same exact spot as the terrorist attack, on the western footpath of Westminster bridge, and took photo's of my happy looking girlfriend and mother of my three children.
It was something I saw on social media that grabbed my attention more than anything else I had seen or been thinking about, and what it said is what inspired me to look into the claims, and what I found was quite shocking.
Before I link the video, I want to say firstly, this thread is not about the person in the video, it's not about his, mine or your political viewpoint. It's not about the circumstances in which he spoke (it could be construed as bad taste to air his views in this manner at such a time), it's not about an attack on a religion, your views on a religion or anything else apart from the cold, hard facts he purports are true.
Here is the video, please watch with an open mind. If you're unable to do so, please refrain from commenting on the thread. If you''re going to comment, at least make it with an educated opinion:
Quite the emotional argument. I get that, but let's take the emotion evoked from yesterdays events out of the discussion. It's easy to get caught up in outrage, for whatever reason.
One thing caught my attention more than anything else during that impassioned speech (you may or may not agree with). It was a claim that:
"driving your car, like this man has done, is exactly what Inspire magazine, which is Al Queda's magazine, was downloaded by fifty thousand British Muslims last year. Fifty thousand downloaded a terrorist manual in our country. Fifty thousand. Not ten! Not twenty! Fifty thousand!".
So, I did a bit of digging. Firstly I looked at what Inspire magazine was. Low and behold, it wasn't hard to find. A simple google search takes you to plenty of websites, where the PDF is freely available to download. What I found whilst having a quick browse, was exactly how this man described in the video. It's a terrorist manual, with instructions in how to carry out various "things", that I will not go into to too much details about. Needless to say, it's shocking that such material can be freely accessed so easily, without so much as web hosting services taking it down.
Next I looked into the claim that fifty thousand British Muslims had downloaded this material. Now, it's impossible to tell somebodies religion over the internet by simply looking at an IP address, so I'm sure not all the downloads were from Muslims, but, I should imagine the vast majority of downloads were from that religious group. It's just common sense to assume that. The total figure of downloads of the 2014 spring edition of Inspire magazine, from British I.P addresses, over a three month period were: 54,322. https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/ ... mes-in-uk/ . There are plenty of other articles and documents disclosing these findings. Check for yourself. I simply chose a tabloid many people here in the UK would see everyday, going about their business.
I thought to myself "well that certainly is quite a large number of people, I wonder what proportion of the Muslim population of the UK that amounts to?". So I looked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_ ... ed_KingdomIslam is the second largest religion in the United Kingdom, with results from the United Kingdom Census 2011 giving the UK Muslim population in 2011 as ~2,706,066, ~4.5% of the total population.
As of January 2017: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... -time.html
So that's just over 3M Muslims currently living in the UK.
So I did a bit of math: Y = P% * X
It turns out that 54000 is 1.8% of 3000000, or nearly 2 in 50 (two in fifty). That is a high proportion of British Muslims downloading this material. It is also not taking into account those that have read the documentation after being handed it, in whatever form, from those who have downloaded it. It is encouraged in all the issues to "pass it on to your brothers and sisters".
It also does not include those who download and distribute other materials from other groups.
So I ask myself, and you the reader, that if a man with simply a car and two knives can carry out what happened yesterday, are we as a Nation vastly under estimating the Jihadi threat on our own doorstep?
Maybe not just in this country, but others in Europe and indeed throughout the world, where countries have a significant Muslim population, where Islam is not the main religion, as I assume the figures for such things would be similar there?