According to his tweet, in 1940 about 7 percent of Germans were Nazis, while 5-10 percent of Muslims are extremists. His tweet argued that given how Nazism affected the world, perhaps that level of extremism among Muslims should be cause for concern as well. Supposedly this is a slur against Muslims. I’m not sure I understand how, unless you imagine that all Muslims are extremists or that Muslim extremism bears no resemblance to Nazism. Of course, I suppose it depends on how you want to define extremism. According to the Pew Research Center, 40 percent of the Muslims in the Palestinian territories believe that suicide bombings against civilians “can often/sometimes” be justified. In Turkey, the number is only 15 per cent. Pakistan is 13 percent. Egypt is 29 percent. Iraq is only 7 per cent. To me, support of suicide bombing against civilians would make someone an extremist. But perhaps ESPN disagrees? Support of things such as the killing of homosexuals, women being required to keep their faces covered, cutting off the hands of thieves, and the like also strikes me as a bit extreme. Forbidding religions other than Islam, also a bit extreme. Antisemitism and Holocaust denial seem to have a lot in common with Nazism, too. And the percentages for all those things are considerably higher among Muslims than the percentages for those who support suicide bombers. Frankly, Schilling’s tweet seems a bit conservative on the percentages, at least to me.
So I have to conclude that ESPN is clueless about reality. Many in the news media, many pundits, and many politicians are mostly going around with their fingers in their ears yelling “la-la-la” because they not only refuse to face reality, they don’t even want to know it. Either that, or they are actually Nazi loving extremists who think ISIS and al-Qaida are just wonderful organizations.
I think that’s unlikely. So I’ll go with them being supremely, and willfully, stupid.