- Islamic radicals are estimated to be 3% of the total Muslim poplulation. If you take 3% of a billion muslims, what do you have?
I don't have the link for this statisic, but if you add up: The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, Jihad-Islamic army, and etc, there are aproximately: 30 million radical Islamics out there.
The number of radical movements keeep growing, so that number may actually be on the conservative side.
FACT:
The roots of today’s war on terror lie in the creation not of Al-Qaeda, but of the Muslim Brotherhood.
"The Muslim Brotherhood, the prototypical Muslim radical group of the modern age, was founded in Egypt by Hassan Al-Banna in 1928. The Brotherhood emerged as a response to the abolition of the caliphate by Turkish secularist pioneer Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1924.
Al-Banna and the Brotherhood considered Islam to have an essential political and social character that needed to be reasserted in the face of the societal ills that had come to the Islamic world with secularism.
Al-Banna excoriated Ataturk for separating “the state from religion in a country which was until recently the site of the Commander of the Faithful.” Sounding notes that Osama bin Laden would echo decades later, Al-Banna characterized the abolition of the caliphate as just part of a larger “Western invasion which was armed and equipped with all [the] destructive influences of money, wealth, prestige, ostentation, power and means of propaganda.”[2]
Al-Banna’s Brotherhood had a deeply spiritual character from its beginning, but it didn’t combat the “Western invasion” with just words and prayers. Al-Banna decried the complacency of the Egyptian elite: “What catastrophe has befallen the souls of the reformers and the spirit of the leaders? . . . What calamity has made them prefer this life to the thereafter [sic]? What has made them . . . consider the way of struggle [sabil al-jihad] too rough and difficult?”[3] When the Brotherhood was criticized for being a political group in the guise of a religious one, al-Banna met the challenge head-on:
“We summon you to Islam, the teachings of Islam, the laws of Islam and the guidance of Islam, and if this smacks of ‘politics’ in your eyes, then it is our policy. And if the one summoning you to these principles is a ‘politician,’ then we are the most respectable of men, God be praised, in politics . . . Islam does have a policy embracing the happiness of this world. . . . We believe that Islam is an all-embracing concept which regulates every aspect of life, adjudicating on every one of its concerns and prescribing for it a solid and rigorous order.”[4]
Al-Banna’s vision was in perfect accord with that of classical Muslim scholars such as Ibn Khaldun, who taught in the fourteenth century that “in the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.”[5]
In a similar spirit, Al-Banna wrote in 1934 that “it is a duty incumbent on every Muslim to struggle towards the aim of making every people Muslim and the whole world Islamic, so that the banner of Islam can flutter over the earth and the call of the Muezzin can resound in all the corners of the world: God is greatest [Allahu akbar]! This is not parochialism, nor is it racial arrogance or usurpation of land.”[6]
Al-Banna would doubtless therefore have looked kindly upon the Palestinian Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi’s 2002 call to believers: “Oh beloved, look to the East of the earth, find Japan and the ocean; look to the West of the earth, find [some] country and the ocean. Be assured that these will be owned by the Muslim nation, as the Hadith says . . . ‘from the ocean to the ocean.’”[7]
According to Brynjar Lia, the historian of the Muslim Brotherhood movement: “Quoting the Qur’anic verse ‘And fight them till sedition is no more, and the faith is God’s’ [Sura 2:193], the Muslim Brothers urged their fellow Muslims to restore the bygone greatness of Islam and to re-establish an Islamic empire. Sometimes they even called for the restoration of ‘former Islamic colonies’ in Andalus (Spain), southern Italy, Sicily, the Balkans and the Mediterranean islands.”[8]
Such talk may have seemed laughable then, but it isn’t so much now in these days of increasing jihadist activity in Spain, the Balkans, and elsewhere in Europe. And even at that time, the Brotherhood had weapons and a military wing.
Scholar Martin Kramer notes that the Brotherhood had “a double identity. On one level, they operated openly, as a membership organization of social and political awakening. Banna preached moral revival, and the Muslim Brethren engaged in good works. On another level, however, the Muslim Brethren created a ‘secret apparatus’ that acquired weapons and trained adepts in their use. Some of its guns were deployed against the Zionists in Palestine in 1948, but the Muslim Brethren also resorted to violence in Egypt. They began to enforce their own moral teachings by intimidation, and they initiated attacks against Egypt’s Jews. They assassinated judges and struck down a prime minister in 1949. Banna himself was assassinated two months later, probably in revenge.”[9]
The Brotherhood was no gathering of marginalized kooks. It grew in Egypt from 150 branches in 1936 to as many as 1,500 by 1944. In 1939 al-Banna referred to “100,000 pious youths from the Muslim Brothers from all parts of Egypt,” and although Lia believes he was exaggerating at that point, by 1944 membership was estimated as between 100,000 and 500,000.[10] By 1937 it had expanded beyond Egypt, setting up “several branches in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Morocco, and one in each of Bahrain, Hadramawt, Hyderabad, Djibouti and,” Lia adds matter-of-factly, “Paris.”[11] These many thousands, dispersed around the world, heard al-Banna’s call to “prepare for jihad and be lovers of death.”[12]
One of the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal children is Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement that glorifies the murder of innocent civilians in Israel. Hamas identifies itself in its Charter as “one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a world organization, the largest Islamic Movement in the modern era. It is characterized by a profound understanding, by precise notions and by a complete comprehensiveness of all concepts of Islam in all domains of life: views and beliefs, politics and economics, education and society, jurisprudence and rule, indoctrination and teaching, the arts and publications, the hidden and the evident, and all the other domains of life.”
Only at this point does Al-Qaeda come into the picture. According to Jane’s Intelligence Review, one man — Sheikh Abdullah Azzam — was both “an influential figure in the Muslim Brotherhood” and “the historical leader of Hamas.”[13]
In the documentary "Jihad in America" the filmmakers went into mosques in this coutry, and secretly taped sermons by American Muslim clerics calling for the overthrow of our government. One very radical mosque...is in Oklahoma City.
"I don't have the link for this statisic, but if you add up: The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, Jihad-Islamic army, and etc, there are aproximately: 30 million radical Islamics out there."
And how many of them did it take to pull off 9/11?
Alright, let's say 30 Million...now, how many of them folks are willing to fight to their deaths in a hopeless cause while they watch their neighbors prosper by adapting alleged INFIDEL values of representative democracy and free-market capitalism?!
As the West succeeds, I'll bet that number decreases markedly.
FReegards...MUD