A mere 5% yearly increase on the estimate the estimate that you just posted for 1997, would place that number at nearly 1.4 million, but even your own numbers show a 20% increase between 1996 and 1997.
Now, Christianity Today (hardly an Islamic propaganda agency) reports a 25% increase in the number of Muslims in America, it also reported a 100% growth in Europe between 1989 and and 1998.
Asia reported a 12% increase.
Noteworthy is the fact that the only continent reporting an actual decrease is Latin America, with a respectable -4.73% during that same period of time.
Now, the problem with the whole idea of turning this into some sort of Islam vs. Christianity thing is absurd, because it calls for actual civil war. You would be declaring war on American citizens, native born and immigrant alike.
That would happen in nearly every nation on Earth...and I haven't checked lately, but I am willing to bet that there are a lot more countries in the world which are 100% Muslim, than there are ones with a completely Christian population. Most certainly, all first world nations will have a significant Islamic presence in their midst.
So, who exactly are you declaring war on? Who is the enemy?
Because, if you are declaring war on Islam, you are declaring war on Americans citizens, on Brits, French, Australians, Russians, Slavs...in turn, they'd be declaring war on us, as well as on their own citizens.
You want to argue about the exact number of Muslims in the world? You go right ahead...meanwhile I'll stand by my position: that the sort of global warfare this would bring about, becomes total war. Country vs. country, and vs. its own citizens as well.
Total global war.
This war has shadow enemies that use religion to create mayhem in order to gain power and wealth.
Concentrate the war on the real enemy: the terrorists, anyone who helps or houses known terrorists, and ignorance.
This war can be won quickly by killing the leaders and detroning a few heads of State.
Why strive for millions of deaths?
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That may be what will be requited.
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That may be what will be required unless we want incidences such as occurred in Bali everywhere.
Including the Saudis who financed the terrorists.
What are you talking about? I was merely mocking the claim that there are 2 billion Muslims in the world, as I still do.
There are sure enough some people with nasty mouths on this thread, but heck, I just defended increasing military aid to Israel on another thread, so what have I got to lose? I'm going to lay out some thoughts, basically on your side of this, but let me serve notice: I don't have your patience and I am not going to answer anybody who responds with the kind of ugly talk you've been getting.
A small points: 1 billion, 2 billion - on your original point, the folly of going to war with [fill in the blank] billion people, it hardly makes much difference. Either way it's a whole bunch of people to be fighting.
I am a Protestant Christian, and I don't believe that Islam is a path to salvation. That doesn't mean that I claim to know who will be saved in the end; but whoever turns up in the Kingdom of Heaven will be there, I believe, because of Jesus, not because of anything or anyone else.
However, I don't think that it follows from that belief that Islam is pure evil. There is such a thing as God's providence, and it can do all sorts of complicated stuff. Providence can do amazing things with the most flawed material; it can use the most unlikely instruments to provide earthly blessings.
Greek paganism wasn't the way of salvation either, but God blessed the world with beauty and insight through the Greeks. Do those who think that because Islam is not Christianity, it is necessarily demonic also want to burn all the works of the pagan demon-worshipers Plato and Homer and Aeschylus?
Is Islam the way of salvation? No. Is it better for the world, in this life, that people not be pagans but believe, even wrongly, in one God who will judge our deeds in the end? Possibly - depends on circumstances.
No system of belief and practice that was all Taliban, all the time, could have lasted this long and won the loyalty of so many people. Radical Islamists are fighting human nature, not trying to redeem it, and that simply doesn't work in the long run. If that were all there was to Islam, it would have been powerful for about the length of time Soviet Communism was powerful, another ideology that made war on human nature.
There is no question that Islamic theology justified war and conquest for Muslim leaders through the centuries. But what did military jihad mean to the average Muslim villager in the Middle East or India or Central Asia during that period? Very little. The vast majority of Muslims in history, especially after the first couple of centuries, were never near a jihad. Islam for them was a moral and social code, a way of living, that "worked" in the sense that it held together communities in which human beings could live and work and deal with one another. In other words, communities unlike Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
Furthermore, whatever some of our friends insist the Koran really says, it is indisputable that mainstream Muslims have had different views on all the present-day questions through the centuries. There are old Islamic communities in Central and East Asia that have been far from obsessed with the letter of sharia. Sufism has been extremely influential through centuries in shaping the piety of ordinary Muslims, and it clearly stresses the spirit over the letter.
So who exactly are we at war with? Are we at war, for example, with the US-based Sufi Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, who urges US Muslims to be patriotic Americans as a religious duty, and supports the separation of Church and state? Kabbani has been warning against Islamist extremism for years, and has been the object of a concerted smear campaign by CAIR and all the other lovely groups on which he blew the whistle. His organization has a whole section on their webpage denouncing and exposing Islamism.
Or are we at war with Khaled Abou El Fadl, the great Muslim legal scholar whose life has been threatened repeatedly by the Islamofascists and their sympathizers?
These men do not represent modernist or marginal streams of Islam. Sheikh Kabbani is the American leader of an old and venerable Sufi order. Abou El Fadl is not a "liberal" Muslim, as the New Republic headline read, but a representative of one of the major traditional schools of Islamic theology and legal interpretation.
Islam has enormous problems dealing with the modern world, but there is reason to think that the sheer quantity of Saudi oil money spent propagating the Wahhabi cult has played a big role in pushing those problems to crisis levels. Wahhabis hate Sufis and traditional Islamic scholarship; their idea of an interpreter of Islam is a power-hungry hater like Bin Laden, an engineer who knows squat about Islamic tradition, but writes manifestos and makes tapes and promotes the blind rage against reality which Wahhabism makes the essence of Islam.
It's good to cross your path again. I have had to reduce my FR time recently, and only write a couple of posts a week these days. Have a great Thanksgiving!