So this meme is going around on Facebook:
As with my thing on grain and pyramids, it gnawed at me. This picture, or ones like it, have been around for a little while, and others have fact checked it, but the math alone should tell you that 5–10% is an unrealistic number of extremist Muslims to equate with Nazis. Once again, I’m going to sidestep the factuality of the statement and numbers presented, and just take a look at this at face value.
How many people are we talking about?
This is the only easy part — there are about 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, so that low number of 5% corresponds to a putative 80 million Muslim “extremists”. Why the quotes? I’ll explain later, for now just keep that number in mind. Coincidentally, 80 million is also about the number of people in Germany today, so that ought to give you an idea of just how many people we’re talking about. It’s a lot.
What’s a “Nazi”?
In 1940, the population was about 70 million, so the meme is positing that there were about 5 million Nazis in Germany in 1940. Given that 7% isn’t enough support to win elections, or even steal a government, the meme must be referring to people who were more involved than simple party supporters.
The government is a much better place to go finding our Nazis. 7% isn’t a totally unrealistic percentage of the population to run a government; in 2012, about 9% of the UK population worked in the civilian public sector (5.7 million employees out of a total population of 63.7 million), and the percentage has definitely been higher. Furthermore, there were 6.6 million Germans in the Wehrmacht in 1940. Certainly, not every soldier or bureaucrat in Nazi Germany was an ardent party member, most were probably just there for a decent job for decent pay, but given what the meme is clearly implying — that a dedicated minority can really screw things up for the rest of the world — it’s useful for us, in this case and only this case, to define a Nazi as someone who’s willing to devote their life in some way to the Nazi party and its causes.
So what’s an “extremist”?
Here’s where stuff gets really dicey. People throw around terms like “extremist”, “jihadist”, “Islamist”, and “terrorist” as if they’re all the same thing. They’re clearly not, and I’m not going to get into why because 1) you can just Google the definitions, and 2) the difference isn’t really germane to this argument. Remember, we’re not checking the facts in the meme — we’re taking them at face value. We have to come up with some definition of “extremist” that at least 5% of the Muslim population of the world can reasonably fall into at a minimum. We’ll look at what would happen if various percentages within that 5% are more “extreme”, but we need a line of demarcation.
Let’s think of “extremism” as a spectrum. At one end, we’ve got guys like Osama bin Laden and the ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Whatever leaders who are all in. At the other end, there are people who are generally okay with what the people at that first end are doing, but aren’t really going to help out. This idea is helpful to map onto the Nazi comparison too — at one end you’ve got guys like Hitler and Eichmann, and at the other end you’ve got Germans who maybe voted Nazi but that was about all. We’re excluding people like Oskar Schindler from this spectrum, because even though he was a card-carrying member of the Nazi party, his actions clearly aren’t those of someone on the extremism spectrum.
To recap: we want to get the numbers in the meme to line up by defining a minimum level of extremism in Muslims on this spectrum that could logically line up with 5% of all Muslims. Then, we need to compare that level of extremism to the level of extremism in Nazis that corresponds to the 7% mentioned in the meme to see if it’s a fair comparison.
Level of extremism: willing to fight and die
This is impossible.
5% of all Muslims is 80 million people. In World War II, the Wehrmacht had under 21 million people serving in it at any time. The Soviets fielded just over 33 million in total. If even two-thirds of the number of Muslims we’re looking at were willing and able to fight, the size of that army would be on par with the two largest organized military forces in that war combined.
Given that there are significant numbers of Muslims all over the world, and that 100,000 is on the high end of how many fighters are in Daesh, there’s just no way that a force of 80 million would just be sitting around twiddling its thumbs. To accept this level of extremism, you’d have to believe that, in every part of the globe but North Africa, the Levant, and Antarctica, there are enough extremists to make the fighting literally 800 times worse across the entire world, and they just… aren’t.
Level of extremism: willing to devote significant resources
This is impossible.
There’s a huge variance in what one might expect the average Muslim’s total access to resources might be; three of the top 10 countries with the highest GDP per capita are Muslim majority countries (think oil wealth), as are three on the bottom. At the same time, this article published in a Pakistani newspaper in 2005 claims that Muslims are among the poorest and least well educated in the world, with Muslim countries producing just 5% of the world’s wealth. It’s not a terribly accurate number, given that Muslims live all over the world and in the US do about as well as anyone else, but let’s go ahead and be uncharitable and say that the total “Muslim GDP” is 5% of the world total even though they make up over 20% of the global population.
The Gross World Product (GWP) in 2014 is estimated to be about $78 trillion. 5% of this would be about $3.9 trillion, so if that’s the Muslim GDP, the “Muslim Extremist GDP” making up 5% of that would be almost $200 billion. Let’s be even more uncharitable and say that, for whatever reason, Muslim extremists are even worse off than their more moderate cousins, and cut this already underestimated figure in half to a round $100 billion.
Now that we know how much money we’re dealing with, how are we going to define “significant resources”? Well, the US spends about 3% of its GDP on its military, and it’s the largest in the world by leaps and bounds, so I think that would count as significant. Therefore, we can define this level of extremism as committing at least 3% of one’s time, money, possessions, or what have you to terrorist groups, militants, and associated groups. It’s a reasonable percentage for an individual, especially when one considers that the average American allocates more than that to clothing.
If 5% of Muslims were extremists at this level, even with all the caveats and underestimating we’ve done, they’d be contributing $3 billion in resources annually to extremist groups. That’s equal to the current annual income of the Islamic State, which is notorious for being the world’s richest terrorist group. Their funding comes from a lot of places, but mostly it’s from oil sales. Groups like Hamas and Hezbollah get a good deal of money from individual donations, but nowhere near that much. To accept this level of extremism, you’d have to believe that there’s a $3 billion flow of resources to extremist groups on an annual basis that somehow isn’t finding its way into the actual spending of those extremist groups, and hasn’t been uncovered (or at least not revealed) by any global intelligence agency.
Level of extremism: willing to devote insignificant resources
This gets included for completeness’ sake. Bearing in mind that we’re establishing a minimum level of extremism that each and every Muslim in that 5% must adhere to, this level is just kinda silly. For 80 million Muslims to contribute $3 billion to some group interested in global jihad, each one has to transfer $37.50 of resources. That’s about 2 weeks’ salary in Bangladesh, which ranks at #150 in the list of 198 countries ordered by GDP per capita. If that’s a significant level of donation, and 10% of that is insignificant, then we’re talking about less than two days’ wages in one of the poorest countries in the world. Even in a place where people need to make every penny count, you couldn’t call that extremism. That’s, like, casualism at best.
Level of extremism: willing to actively promote and disseminate propaganda
This is possible, but massively unlikely.
There’s no doubt that terrorist groups use social media. Intelligence services monitor what they can, but there’s an entire dark web for these extremists to run around in. The vast majority of the 5% of Muslim extremists would have to do the majority of their communication in this space; 80 million people talking, demonstrating, printing, blogging, and tweeting in the clear would be a bit conspicuous.
Even though that part of the internet isn’t indexed, it does have to send info through the same pipes as everything else. XKCD reports that Cisco estimates that in a normal second of internet traffic, 167 terabits (or about 21 terabytes, that’s important) of data are exchanged. There are a number of estimates regarding what percentage of all traffic on the internet is dark web traffic, but 80 million people sending a few megabytes of extremist messages a day wouldn’t even begin to put a dent in a fraction of the dark net’s traffic. Tools to access this part of the web, like Tor, are free, effective, and can even run on a smartphone, making it relatively easy to use.
So why is it still unlikely? Well, to begin with, Tor only has about 2.5 million users. It’s far and away the most popular tool for accessing the internet anonymously, much less getting on the dark web, so either these extremists are using some great new technology that we haven’t heard of en masse, or the good folks at Tor have underestimated usage by a few orders of magnitude.
Second, the ease of use really is relative. Tech savvy folks can usually get the hang of it after a little trial and error, but that Pakistani article referenced in the previous section claims that about half of all Muslims are illiterate. It’s possible that the 5% of Muslim extremists referenced just happen to be the literate tech-savvy ones, but it’s a stretch.
Level of extremism: generally in favor of attacks carried out by violent extremists
There are plenty of ways to interpret and parse the data, but if you boil it down, it’s easy to argue that about 14% of Muslims worldwide fall into this level of extremism, in that they think that violence against civilians can be justified. It’s higher in some countries than others, but globally, this is the first level of extremism that meets any kind of criteria for believability, and in fact carries the weight of evidence.
Wait, what were we doing again?
Yeah, this piece is kinda long. Remember, someone was comparing extremist Muslims to Nazis, saying that only 7% of Germans were Nazis in 1940 and 5–10% of Muslims were extremists?
The most extreme form of extremism that makes any kind of logical sense for 5–10% of all the Muslims in the world to be involved in at a minimum involves a world where 80 million people are all whipping themselves up into a frenzy online using obscure tools and methods, while not contributing significant resources to the effort. Compare this to what those 7% of Nazis would have to be doing to meet their bar — fighting in the army, running the government, actively building and maintaining the edifice of Nazi power. It’s not even close.
If 5% of the world’s Muslims were “coming to get us”, like boogeymen in the night, they’d already be here, and we’d be royally screwed.
