I recently encountered a post on reddit that has also been doing the rounds on India’s notorious Whatsapp based troll factory. The forward starts off like this, and immediately sows the seeds of fear that is aided by inherent Islamophobia that has been allowed to fester for years via popular media, news, propaganda and stereotyping.

According to a Harvard University study, the Islamisation of a country cannot be stopped once the Muslim population reaches 16 percent of the total population. This is what Islam expert, Nikoletta Incze, said on 22 June’19 on Hungarian public television.

Photo by João Silas

I put on my researcher hat and dived right in. Firstly, the only article link provided with this information, other than declaring “according to a harvard study” is from a page called “Israel Wire” (the link is currently giving a 404 error, so I haven’t linked to it here and I don’t want to contribute to spreading misinformation). The link doesn’t actually say much for its veracity. So I looked into the researcher being quoted, Nikoletta Incze. It was easy to quickly establish that

#1 — Nikoletta Incze has never done any research with Harvard.

#2 — Nowhere in the Harvard website (or scholarly publishing from there) is there an article that talks about Islamization and a tipping point in their population percentage.

For both of these above, a search on Google Scholar, or if you have access to scholarly publishing platforms like Researchgate, will confirm the same. If the research done is incapable of being published as a peer reviewed and validated, it cannot be taken seriously. It’s about as valid as sentiments that the earth is flat or that salt is dangerous for humans because it has scary chemicals in it like Sodium and Chlorine.

#3 — The only places on the internet where the same text from the post that’s doing the rounds appears is on far right forums, islamophobic websites and social media groups, and outright-Nazi webpages. There is no verified research to support the statements.

The fact that anyone sharing this article has such esteemed company as the Nazis, that ought to make you pause and question what you’re siding with, but if that isn’t enough, let’s dig further into the information. A bit more digging on the quote researcher reveals

#4 — Nikoletta is part of an organization called CSPII — Center for Study of Political Islam — based out of Hungary. Her only published research (after much digging) is a one page excerpt from a publication from a University of Business and Economics in Hungarian.

So let’s look further into CSPI, the name comes across as all serious and valid and it can be easy to assume they are some kind of authority on the subject.

#5 — CSPI is an organization created by someone named Bill French (who also goes by the name Bill Warner). He is on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) tracker for being one of 10 anti-Muslim “activists” or “hard liners” in the US.

#6 — CSPI is also listed as an Islamophobic organization by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)

#7 — Bill French is a former physics professor who has “has no formal training or background in law, Islam or Shariah law — which in any case is not an established legal code” but that hasn’t stopped him as he has written fearmongering books rife with Islamophbic myths and spreads hateful rhetoric about the same. He’s considered as being among the “who’s who” of Islamophobes by CAIR

So anything coming out of CSPI needs to be validated multiple times independently due to the obvious Islamophobic lean of their material, that comes from zero expertise on the subject and stems purely from the perspective of fearmongering, hate and propaganda.

Now the rest of the forwarded message features a bunch of statistics from a Dr. Peter Hammond that aims to convince people about a population tipping point. Let’s look at this further.

#8 — Peter Hammond is a Christian missionary. This isn’t some conspiracy theorist declaration, it’s well established with a simple search. In fact, in his book description on Amazon and Google books, it says it is a “response to the relentless anti-Christian propaganda that has been generated by Muslin and Marxist groups and by Hollywood film makers”. So it’s clear what the agenda is behind the book

#9 — According to SPLC, Peter Hammond is “a staunch defender of Zimbabwe’s last white leader, the racial supremacist Ian Smith, Hammond heads a South Africa-based “ministry” called Frontline Fellowship that is anti-Islam, anti-gay, anti-abortion and anti-communist. He believes all churches should be armed and ready for attack”.

Now when looking at the data itself, it is also important to understand the basic research axiom that Correlation does not imply Causation. If reading the information on Wikipedia is too complicated, here’s a simple example to explain that. Say you live in a Scandinavian country and you look outside your window in the winter and the sun is shining brightly with clear skies. You check the temperature outside and it says -20C. Based on these two things, you declare that the sun is what makes the temperature cold. This kind of nonsensical conclusion is what emerges when you take correlation as causation. The entire set of data shared in the rest of the forward (and likely the book) suffers from this level of idiocy.

#9 — The data provided takes percentages from the CIA world factbook in 2007 and then draws similar correlations with zero evidence of causation. How is the current percentage of population at that time any evidence of what he’s claiming? I’d argue that it is entirely possible to take the current percentage of people owning dogs and draw conclusions by selectively choosing data like that. Does this mean that dog owners are taking over the world?

#10 — The data also conveniently omits inconvenient information and fails to explain a crucial jump in logic. Take the simple one, a country like Saudi Arabia, it has been a majority Muslim nation for centuries now, and it doesn’t actually fit any of his conclusions on how the percentage of Muslims changes the country. But it’s included anyway as depicting a horror end state. And it arbitrarily says countries like United Arab Emirates, Indonesia and Morocco are just one step away from this horror end sate, which anyone who has looked at anything related to these countries (or even visited them) would know makes no sense whatsoever.

#11— I could spend pages just dissecting the information and how the correlations have no causation at all, but it is not my burden to disprove every single bit of disinformation in this junk bit of fake news. Just know that there is actually no evidence that meets any measure of scientific rigor, whether it’s Peter Hammond, or Nicoletta Incze, or CSPI, or Bill French.

This is entirely fake news. However, this misinformation from a book of Peter Hammond has been doing the rounds for over a decade now and you can only find Islamophobes referring to it in their endless quest for finding information that feeds the confirmation bias of their hate. It is often used by people in some countries to justify their unwillingness to help refugees, just as Nikoletta Incze would in Orban’s Hungary or any far right bigot would in the US to justify the Muslim ban. This kind of writing is exactly what the Nazis would likely have written about Jews in the 1930s to justify the horrors they were gearing up to commit.

Given this, it isn’t surprising to see it spring up now in India at a time when the government there is setting up laws to discriminate against and disenfranchise Muslims, while setting up detention camps and having the state brazenly committing atrocities against the community in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Hateful bigots always seek out information that matches their confirmation bias to justify any horrors they are going to commit. So if anyone is sharing this information without questioning it and using it to justify potentially putting Muslims in detention centers and genocide, you know exactly the kind of vile person they are.