He said “210,000 deaths.” So Laynie read the source.

Edited transcript

This transcript was recovered from Laynie’s full Facebook upload and lightly edited for punctuation, paragraphing, and obvious speech-recognition errors. The meaning and argument are preserved.

“210,000 deaths.” Okay, yeah, let’s speak about it, because I found the source you cited. Fondapol counted 48,035 Islamist terrorist attacks worldwide from 1979 through May 2021 that resulted in 210,138 deaths. Yes, that number is real. But here’s what you left out: you read the first portion and then stopped reading.

The same report says that 89.5% of those attacks occurred in Muslim countries and 91.7% of the deaths occurred in Muslim countries. That was 192,782 deaths in Muslim countries, and Fondapol itself concludes that most of the lives lost were Muslim lives. I’m not going to call all 210,138 of these “Muslim-on-Muslim deaths,” because the database does not identify every victim’s religion. But your own source says the overwhelming majority happened in Muslim countries and that most of the people who died were Muslims.

There is another huge piece of context: this is not a database of 210,138 civilians. When Fondapol breaks the attacks down by target, the largest category is military targets at 31.7% of attacks. Civilians were 25%. Police were 18.3%. That tells us the targets of the attacks; it does not mean that 31.7% of the people killed were soldiers. But it shows that a huge amount of the violence happened in the context of insurgencies, militaries, and security forces—not 210,138 attacks on random civilians.

The geography makes it clearer. Afghanistan was the single most affected country in the world, with 66,662 deaths. That one country accounted for 31.7% of the worldwide Islamist-terrorism death toll. The source says attacks and victims increased after the Taliban were driven from power by the American-led coalition following 9/11, particularly among international forces and members of the Afghan government. Between 2001 and 2012, Fondapol counted 2,536 attacks in Afghanistan that killed at least 8,054 people, and attributed 95.2% of those attacks to the Taliban.

The report says the countries most affected by Islamist terrorism were countries that had experienced periods of war—specifically Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. Just four extremist organizations—the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, and al-Qaeda—accounted for 80% of all victims in the worldwide dataset.

Now let’s apply this body-count logic consistently. According to Fondapol’s database, Islamist terrorism caused 3,121 deaths in the United States from 1979 to 2021. Compare that with firearm homicide in America. A JAMA Network Open study using CDC data counted 438,359 firearm homicides in the United States from 1990 to 2021. That is about 140 times the number of Americans killed by Islamist terrorism in Fondapol’s database, even though the firearm statistic covers a shorter period. Do I take those 438,359 American deaths and call them Christian violence? No, because ordinary homicide statistics are not religious statistics.

Now add military violence. Airwars estimates that since 9/11 at least 22,679—and potentially as many as 48,308—civilians were likely directly killed by U.S. strikes, while noting that attribution in some U.S.-led coalition operations is uncertain. B’Tselem documents at least 2,996 Palestinians who were not participating in hostilities when Israeli forces killed them during the first decade after September 2000; another 1,391 who did not participate in hostilities during the 2014 Gaza war; and another 137 during the May 2021 fighting. That is 4,524 people across just those three selected periods.

Separately, Human Rights Watch says approximately 900 Lebanese civilians were killed during the 2006 Lebanon war and found that Israeli airstrikes caused most of those civilian deaths. I’m keeping that 900 out of the calculation because the source says “most,” not “all.” I’m not trying to inflate the numbers.

If I deliberately play the same raw body-count game and add only 438,359 U.S. firearm homicides, 22,679 to 48,308 civilians likely killed by U.S. strikes, and the 4,524-person B’Tselem subtotal, I get between 465,562 and 491,191 deaths. Compared with the worldwide Islamist-terrorism number of 210,138, that is between 2.2 and 2.3 times as many.

Are firearm homicides, military strikes, and terrorism equivalent categories? No. That is literally the point. You can create a terrifying body count for practically any population if you mix crime, warfare, and terrorism together and then decide the number represents an entire religion.

So let’s stop mixing categories and make an actual extremist-to-extremist comparison. The U.S. Government Accountability Office looked at fatal extremist incidents in America from September 12, 2001 through the end of 2016. Far-right extremists were responsible for 62 fatal incidents; radical Islamist extremists were responsible for 23. That is 73% versus 27% of the fatal extremist incidents. The death tolls were much closer—106 from far-right extremists versus 119 from radical Islamist extremists—but 49 of those 119 radical-Islamist deaths, or 41%, occurred in the single attack at the Pulse nightclub.

Yes, Islamist terrorism is real. It is horrific. I condemn it. But your statistic does not prove that Muslims are uniquely violent. Your own source says 91.7% of those deaths occurred in Muslim countries and concludes that most of the lives lost were Muslim lives. It says the military—not civilians—was the largest target category by number of attacks. It says the countries hit hardest were countries experiencing war, and that four extremist organizations caused 80% of the victims. You told me to speak about this, so I did. You should probably read an entire source instead of just the first headline.