November 13th, 2015. Thousands of Parisians are out to enjoy a Friday evening. They are at restaurants, at concerts, at a football match. In a series of coordinated terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic extremists, over 100 people would lose their lives, and hundreds more would be injured.

What the fuck is going on?

In the coming days, the details of the massacre would be digested by those around the world. Social media chatter would explode. Terabytes of memes would be created. Open letters would be written. Tweets and facebook posts would erupt. Emotions would pour out onto the internet. Words like “bigotry” and “multiculturalism” would be interchanged and attached to fallacious arguments.

What the fuck is going on?

How does a sane person navigate the Internets response to the November Paris attacks? I have spent the past few days trying to sift through thousands of words of misinformation, of agenda laden drivel, and emotional reaction, in an attempt to piece together a rational understanding of the attacks. I started by trying to understand what led these Islamic terrorists to carry out these heinous acts. What motivated them? Well, as you can imagine, people have different views on this. Very different.

The sounds from the left

The overwhelming reaction from the left is one of self blame. Salon has published numerous articles assigning blame to the West for creating Islamic terrorism. Headlines like “We created Islamic extremism: Those blaming Islam for ISIS would have supported Osama bin Laden in the ’80s“ or “This is why they hate us: The real American history neither Ted Cruz nor the New York Times will tell you” or “Our terrorism double standard: After Paris, let’s stop blaming Muslims and take a hard look at ourselves”are a few of Salon’s most popular articles at time of writing. All of these articles shift blame from the Islamic terrorists that carried out the attacks, and try to substitute geopolitical landscapes created by the West as the driving factor leading up to the attacks. These articles, as you can imagine, are littered with bias, and littered with fallacies and misleading points. In Ben Norton’s article (the third of those I listed), he states the following:

They frequently lack evidence, but depend on the blunt force of anti-Muslim bigotry to bolster their accusations. Actual evidence, on the other hand, shows that less than two percent of terrorist attacks from 2009 to 2013 in the E.U. were religiously motivated. In 2013, just one percent of the 152 terrorist attacks were religious in nature; in 2012, less than three percent of the 219 terrorist attacks were inspired by religion.

Wow, anyone reading that must certainly be surprised by that statistic. Is it possible that we have indeed been falsely led to believe that Islamic terrorism is a real danger?

Fuckin’ nope.

What Ben Norton fails to mention is that the majority of actual deaths from terrorist attacks is extremely high for Islamic terrorism, Islamic terrorism is on the rise, and that if you include deaths in all Western countries like the USA, Australia, etc. Islamic terrorism is responsible for the grand majority of deaths in recent years. Norton goes on to blame the West for the attacks, and minimize the blame on the Islamic terrorists. He provides no solutions as how to handle the situation. He even inadvertently counters his first point by pointing out the frequency with which these Islamic terrorist attacks occur in the rest of the world:

Unfortunately, tragedies like the one we see in Paris are daily events in much of the Middle East, no thanks to the policies of the governments of France, the U.S., the U.K., and more.

After reading many more articles like Ben’s , it was clear that the far left had a distorted view about what happened…..but let’s be fair here, so did the far right.

The sounds from the right

After reading the bullshit put out by Salon, I almost started to believe their masochistic views and felt the western guilt brewing on top of my white guilt…it was almost too much. Was I a bigot for placing the blame on Islamic extremists and acknowledging they were Islamic? Luckily, after seeing the reaction of some American’s toward Muslim’s in America, I realized I wasn’t as much of an irrational bigot as I had feared. The true bigot’s were showing themselves. The hate crimes against American Muslims started popping up just days after the attacks. In an article that no one would have expected from Breitbart.com, a few examples were given:

— In a suburb of Austin, Texas, leaders of the Islamic Center of Pflugerville on Monday discovered feces and torn pages of the Quran that had been thrown at the door of the mosque. Muslim leaders also encouraged authorities to investigate the act as a hate crime. — In a suburb of Houston, Texas, authorities on Tuesday arrested a man accused of threatening on social media to “shoot up a mosque.” He was charged with making a terroristic threat, a felony.

Okay Texas.

So clearly shooting up an American mosque is not very likely to bag a terrorist. These extremists really are rare when you count up over 1 billion Muslims. So what role DOES Islam play?

Understanding the very sad but very real threat of Islam

While Jim Bob is clearly wrong to threaten to shoot up a mosque full of most likely innocent Americans, Islam may in fact play a larger role in this global dance than Ben Norton and apologists want to believe. Sam Harris , a famous voice of secularism, said it best in his essay he published following the murder of James Foley in 2014.

Understanding and criticizing the doctrine of Islam—and finding some way to inspire Muslims to reform it—is one of the most important challenges the civilized world now faces. But the task isn’t as simple as discrediting the false doctrines of Muslim “extremists,” because most of their views are not false by the light of scripture. A hatred of infidels is arguably the central message of the Koran. The reality of martyrdom and the sanctity of armed jihad are about as controversial under Islam as the resurrection of Jesus is under Christianity. It is not an accident that millions of Muslims recite the shahadah or make pilgrimage to Mecca. Neither is it an accident that horrific footage of infidels and apostates being decapitated has become a popular form of pornography throughout the Muslim world. Each of these practices, including this ghastly method of murder, find explicit support in scripture.

While Muslims all over the world are indeed speaking out against the attack, they are claiming that ISIS members and other extremist groups are “not true Muslims”. It is understandable why they would want to do this. No peaceful person wants to be associated with the extremists of their faith. Unfortunately, it is simply impossible to deny the simple fact that Islamic extremists are indeed Muslim by very definition, and their interpretations of the Koran are no more far fetched than a self proclaimed “moderate” interpretation. But still, they are rare, right? Islam is mostly a peaceful religion today, like Christianity and Judaism?

The Modern State of Islam

The Pew research forum did a massive study in 2013 in order to better classify how Muslims felt about different issues. The results were very surprising. Perhaps most important, were the respondents beliefs on Sharia Law. Pew defines Sharia as the following:

Sharia Sharia, or Islamic law, offers moral and legal guidance for nearly all aspects of life – from marriage and divorce, to inheritance and contracts, to criminal punishments. Sharia, in its broadest definition, refers to the ethical principles set down in Islam’s holy book (the Quran) and examples of actions by the Prophet Muhammad (sunna).

Sharia law is generally regarded in the west as a system that allows for extreme human rights violations, including corporal punishments for things like apostasy (in this context, the the denouncement and abandonment of Islam) or adultery (often punishable by stoning (getting rocks thrown at you until you die, in case you didn’t know)). Sharia is a feminists worst nightmare as well, with a key clause stating the requirement for women to obey their husbands. Surely, I thought these beliefs were archaic, and thus long dead. I was wrong. Let’s look at some charts from Pew. When looking at these, it is important to remember that these data are representative of millions upon millions of people. A 26% somewhere is not a negligible minority, but represents many times more people than you will ever meet in your entire life, or roughly the number of people Charlie Sheen has slept with.

Firstly, how malleable is Sharia?

It varies. Clearly though, large numbers of Muslims believe that Sharia is not open to interpretation. That’s important. Now here’s a kick to the gut. How many Muslims want Sharia to be the law of the land?

Holy fuck. That is concerning. But surely, I would be free from Sharia as I am not a Muslim myself, right?

This chart right here. This is important. This chart is perhaps the most important chart out there right now. The direction that these bars move in the future will have enormous implications. A significant number of Muslims believe that Sharia should be enforced upon all in the land. This single belief is important to understanding the entire dilemma facing the world right now. We will come back to this chart.

Before moving on, let’s understand the current state of Islam in France.

Pew estimates roughly 5 million Muslims currently in France. The highest of any European nation. Most of these are from North African descent.

By 2030, Muslims are to be an estimated 10.3% of the population. What makes this so alarming is the failure of the French population to assimilate the Islamic minority. Assimilation of Islamic immigrants in France has been a massive point of contention. A cursory google search will reveal ongoing controversy pointing out the current discombobulated state of Islamic assimilation in the country. The failure of proper assimilation in European countries is why that previous chart about Sharia is so important. If Muslims retain Sharia as their belief system, and fail to incorporate Western ideals into their religion, we see obvious clashing.

Liberal tendencies in the west towards things like Abortion and Homosexuality highlight these discrepancies. Some more charts from Pew.

Combine these with Islamic attitudes towards women. Another alarming chart.

It is not hard to see the clash between Western views and Islamic views on what a proper society should look like. If assimilation is to fail, these stark differences are bound to continue to cause problems. It is important to admit these differences, and acknowledge the incongruities between the West and Islam in it’s current state, and to question their ability to coexist in a single society.

The solution

The first step in any solution is to recognize the problem outlined above. This is where the left has already largely failed. The second step, however, is not waging a cultural war from the outside, as Jim Bob Mosque Bomber would have you believe. Going to war with Islam will not work. Nor will allowing Islam to grow unchecked as is to the point where western ideals are allowed to be trampled.

The solution is Islamic reform from within the Islamic community.

Yes I just said that. Reform the ideas that pulse through an entire population of people. Is it a daunting task? Fuckin ya. Is it possible? Also yes. There ARE indeed Muslim voices who are acknowledging this need for reform, as opposed to merely condemning extremists. maajid nawaz is one such person. Maajid is a former Islamic extremist, and has since reformed and is a leading voice towards the reformation of Islam. He pushes for the education of young Muslim’s to include the teaching of tolerance of all religions, and even atheists. He pushes for respect for human rights within Islam. While Europe struggles with it’s assimilation woes, and the USA bickers about letting in Syrian refugees, will Maajid and his fellow reformers succeed?

Help us Islamic reformers, you are our only hope.