What To Call Mid-Eastern Terrorists

There is a lot of criticism from the political right of the Obama administration's apparent refusal to use the term Islamic Militants or Islamic Terrorists.  Well, I am on the right, politically, and think we need to examine these terms and perhaps examine our use of the terms.  I estimate below that Muslim participation in terrorist activities is smaller than 1/10 of 1%!  Besides the fairness issue, discussed below, there are almost 1.6 billion people who are Muslim and not involved in terrorism.  

There are about 1.6 billion Muslims in the world.

Of those, there are:

35,000 Afghan Taliban

35,000 Pakistan Taliban

18,000 Al Qaeda (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq)

31,500 ISIS

65,000 Hezballah ( some reports say 150,000)

50,000 misc other militants in North Africa 

That is 234,500 total or 319,500 if you use the 150,000 for Hezballah.  

If we take the larger number and add in 10,000 Hamas fighters, a really high estimate based on Wikipedia and news stories, we would have fewer than 330,000 fighters.  Adding in 3-4 support and supporters, we would peg the number of Islamic militants at 1,320,000.

The Madhi army in Iraq is somewhere between 50,000 and 500,000 depending on who is doing the counting.  Generally, however, they are not terrorists, they are militants in Iraq and for Iraq that use guerrilla tactics. It is not fair to lump them into the terrorist classes.  Neither is it fair to add in the Iranian army though the Islamic leadership does support Hezballah.  They are defending their country and way of life.  It is fair to lump in the entire population of Iran if we end up at war with them but, hopefully, that does not happen.

Also, using the rest of the known militants, we get the 1,320,000 number.  If we further elevate the Islamic militant number to 1.6 million, that still is less than 0.1% of all of the Muslims in the world.  The 99.9% are watching us to see how we behave.

So, if fewer than 0.1% of Muslims are actively pursuing terrorism, perhaps using the term Islamic Terrorist is demeaning to the 99.9% of Muslims who are not terrorists.  After all, we referred to the KKK as the KKK, bad folks, murderers, and even domestic terrorists, not Christian terrorists or Christian militants.  We do not refer to the Russian Militants in the Ukraine as Christian Militants either nor did we call the Serbian fighters engaged in genocide during the Bosnian war Militant Christians.

Do I see a problem with the term?  No, but I am not Muslim.  I have Muslim friends who probably don't appreciate the term.  With less than one tenth of a percent of all Muslims involved in this terror war, perhaps we should stop calling the bad guys Islamic militants, Islamic terrorists, etc. Their defining definition is that they have chosen an evil method to confront those in the rest of the world who don't want to live in the seventh century.  They happen to be Muslims.  In fact, the terrorists so far have killed more Muslims than non-Muslims.

Do we really want or need 1.6 billion enemies?