The website Vox.com appears to still be thriving, despite my best efforts to warn people off of their willfully ignorant “explanatory journalism.” As I have previously observed, we’re on the tail end of a media “golden age for liberals where, to paraphrase Kipling, all the young turks were paid for their writing, and none of them paid for their sins.”
Chief among those young writers whose transgressions are in arrears is Vox’s foreign policy reporter Zack Beauchamp. (At least, I think that’s an accurate description of what he does, because Vox eschews job descriptions in favor of listing Beauchamp as “Dictator-for-Life” and explains “Zack writes about all of the things that are not American things.” What wacky workplace innovation will millennials think up next?) Beauchamp achieved a degree of notoriety last year when he wrote that Israel was restricting traffic on the “physical bridge, like the Tappan Zee,” connecting the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. (Perhaps needless to say, no such bridge exists.)
However, in lieu of admonishing himself, Beauchamp prefers to punish his readers. So here he is again with a headline that’s pretty Vox, even for Vox — “This study obliterates the myth that Muslims are more violent.” Beauchamp frames the issue this way:
What these conversations usually lack is data; that is, evidence that Muslim societies are actually more violent than other ones. And it turns out, according to UC-Berkeley Professor M. Steven Fish, that judging by murder rates, people in Muslim-majority countries actually tend to be significantly less violent.
Beauchamp goes on to note Fish’s conclusion that Muslim countries average 2.4 murders per annum 100,000 people vs. 7.5 in non-Muslim countries. Go ahead and read the post if you must, but that’s more than enough information in the paragraphs above to size-up how aggressively dumb this is.
First, there’s the way he immediately equates concern about Muslim terrorism with bigotry. This casual slander of people who have concerns regarding terriorism is, ironically enough, a kind of bigotry itself, and is self-evidently negating. Second, there’s the typical absurdly grandiose conclusion being drawn from a single data point. Moreoever, favorably citing this statistic is essentially a brief in favor of authoritarianism. At The Federalist, David Harsanyi makes quick work of this:
Indeed, authoritarian societies tend to achieve docile populations through brutal repression and an alarmingly expansive definition of what constitutes the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. When Iran hangs people from cranes for the “crime” of homosexuality, it’s not counted toward the murder rate. It’s murder nonetheless.
Third, trying to use the domestic murder rate in Muslim countries as an explanation for terrorism is stupid and misleading. As Beauchamp puts it, “If Islam itself were in fact the key cause of Islamist terrorism, you’d expect ordinary Muslims to be more violent than ordinary non-Muslims.” As Harsanyi explains, “The measure of a religion isn’t how it treats its own, but how it treats everyone else. Some data on the experience of Jews or Christians in Islamic nations might help clarify this point.” And Muslim murder rates also reflect that few Muslim countries, if any, have diverse and open societies by Western standards. The murder rate may be low in Muslim countries, but I suspect it would spike considerably if Westerners moved in en masse and started opening synagogues and churches.
Finally, Beauchamp’s headline promises a lot. If we’re going to seriously examine the “myth that Muslims are more violent,” one would note that murder rate is just one way to measure violence. I suspect a conversation about whether or not Muslim countries have comparatively troubling rates of violence against women, and to what extent this is a result of Islamic doctrine, would prove rather troubling for earnest young liberals otherwise anxious to suss out the anti-Muslim bigots amongst us. Alas, what these conversations usually lack is data. But what we do know suggests that the incidence of rape in Muslim countries might be even higher than in University of Virginia frat houses:
To be fair to Beauchamp, he does some throat clearing at the end of his post about Sunni-Shia sectarian violence and problematic Islamist theology, but it is an exceedingly insubstantial caveat. If Beauchamp wants to warn against anti-Muslim bigotry, there are ways to do this without downplaying the much more pressing concern of Islamic terrorism. And it should certainly be done without slandering those of us worried about the latter and innocent of the former. In the meantime, it’s probably best to inoculate yourself from such smug and casually erroneous thinking and avoid reading Vox.com altogether.
