Baiting Muslims

The above chart from Pew Research tells you that rather soon, birth rates among Muslims will accelerate well-beyond the replacement rate in the Christian world. We are about 7.5 billion people on earth right now, and assuming no nuclear holocaust anytime soon or a massive death rate from climate change, we are expected to be well over 9.7 billion by 2050. Whew! The most populous places will be in Asia and Africa, but the two largest religions in the world will continue to be Christians and Muslims.

Today, according to worldometers.info, there are “2,173,180,000 Christians (31% of world population), of which 50% are Catholic, 37% Protestant, 12% Orthodox, and 1% other [and] 1,598,510,000 Muslims (23%), of which 87-90% are Sunnis, 10-13% Shia.” Eventually, there will be more Muslims than Christians if current trends continue. There about 330 million Americans (out of about 364 million for all of North America). Europe is home to about 740 million people, Asia 4.5 billion and Africa 1.25 billion. Latin America and the Caribbean swallow another 650 million.

Why the numbers Peter? Because they basically tell us that if we keep baiting and antagonizing so many in the rest of the world, we will be so badly outnumbered that if they get pushed hard enough – notwithstanding our military that consumes about 41% of the world’s collective military budget – they have the numbers to crush us. And with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, we just may not be able to defend ourselves fast enough. Madman Kim Jong-un will soon have the capacity to deploy his nukes directly against our contiguous 48 states… and while we have strong defenses against his ICBM-ambitions, and his apparent willingness to use them, those weapons are in uncomfortable places all over the world, most notably a very unstable Pakistan, filled with lots of Donald Trump’s “radical Jihadists.” It was Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan who provided both North Korea and Iran with nuclear-weapons-knowhow.

So even as Donald Trump embraces Egypt’s new dictatorial military leader – President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi – with renewed arm’s sales, even as his new golf resort in the UAE opens and his ties to the Saudi monarchy are reinforced, his desired travel ban of travelers from Syria, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Sudan (from which zero terrorists have attacked anything in the U.S.) and his “extreme vetting” of people traveling from Islamic nations have been widely interpreted by ordinary Muslims as an attack on their religion. His embrace of “anything Israel does is OK with me” – allowing Netanyahu to approve yet another Jewish settlement on the Palestinian-area on the West Bank – only adds fuel to that perceived anti-Muslim, anti-Arab perception. And remember there are 1.6 billion of them and 330 million of us.

Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric has become fodder for Islamists everywhere to recruit violent militants to attack Western targets. ISIS calls his travel order the “blessed ban,” because of its recruiting value. And while ISIS is likely to be decimated in its territorial ambitions in Syria, Iraq and beyond, our failed whack-a-mole efforts against such fundamentalist terrorists simply allows the next batch of ISIS-like terrorists to take over and fight the West.

“The terrorist group ISIS has finally spoken out about US President Donald Trump… ISIS spokesman Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajer said in an audio recording released Tuesday on the encrypted messaging app Telegram that the US is ‘bankrupt’ and ‘being run by an idiot,’ according to Reuters… Muhajer also told Americans: ‘The signs of your demise are evident to every eye… There is no more evidence than [that] you being run by an idiot who does not know what Syria or Iraq or Islam is,’ Muhajer said in the statement…

“But its supporters seemed to cheer a Trump presidency — last year Foreign Affairs magazine analyzed ISIS' online channels and interviewed a dozen supporters and defectors who said Trump would ‘lead the United States on a path to self-destruction.’” AOL.com, April 4^th. Trump is becoming the terrorists’ best friend. And exactly how many Muslims do you think will cooperate with American operatives to root out terrorists among themselves, when they believe that Donald Trump is the self-proclaimed enemy of Islam? As Western powers are slowly pulling away from mutual defense expectations as the Donald trashes NATO and other international treaties and organizations? Yeah, exactly! But wait, there’s one more consideration.

Does his April 6^th cruise missile strike against a Syrian airbase (that launched a horrific gas attack against its own people) reverse some of this negative perception? A bit with Sunnis in the region, adding strain to relations with Shiites and Russia, but otherwise well received by most of the rest of the world. Are we safer as a result? Time will tell.

I’m Peter Dekom, and Donald Trump’s proclivity continually swat at wasp nests has made this world infinitely more dangerous for Americans and American interests everywhere, but helping innocent victims is a positive move.