In a new video, Truth Revolt’s Ben Shapiro took on the popular leftist talking point that radicals make up a tiny fraction of the overall Islamic population. Citing recent comments by Barack Obama and “horrifyingly mediocre actor” Ben Affleck, Shapiro used surveys from many of the nations with a large Muslim population to debunk such claims.
He conceded that other faiths, including Judaism and Christianity, hold certain violent texts sacred, though he made one unavoidable distinction.
“Believers in those particular texts are not currently ramming airlines into towers or beheading journalists or mutilating female genitalia,” he explained.
While actively violent jihadists are clearly a minority within the faith, Shapiro noted that far too many support such radical ideals.
“Almost 50 percent of Indonesians actually support strict sharia law, not just in Indonesia but in a lot of countries,” he said of the predominantly Muslim nation, “and 70 percent blame the United States, Israel, or somebody else for 9/11.”
Using those statistics, he estimated 143 million radical Muslims live within that country.
By determining how many Muslims in other nations hold a similar ideology, including a belief in honor killings or terror attacks, Shapiro concluded more than 800 million practitioners of the faith would qualify as extremists. That number includes nearly 500,000 living within the U.S.
“That’s not a minority,” he said, “that’s now a majority. The myth of the tiny radical Muslim minority is just that – it’s a myth. And unfortunately it’s a myth that’s going to get a lot of civilized people killed.”