I don’t consider myself particularly racist or biased against any group; I try to hold all of humanity in equally low esteem. But I’m not stupid, and I’m not too timid, and that means that I occasionally break taboos and commit the unholy sin of noticing patterns and speaking of them.

Al-Qaeda wants me dead. If you’re reading this, they probably want you dead too. Incidentally, everyone in Al-Qaeda is a Muslim.

There are terrorists holding schoolchildren hostage in Russia. There are a number of reasons to believe these terrorists are Chechnyan, and that means that they are most likely Muslims.

There’s a war being fought in Darfur. Rampaging militias are attacking everyone they encounter, be they military or civilian. It just so happens that these militias are composed primarily of Muslims.

A 26-year-old National Guard Specialist was arrested in February for attempting to provide US military secrets to Al-Qaeda. Coincidentally, in 1999 Anderson quit being a Lutheran Christian and became a Muslim.

Iran recently announced that it would once against throw caution to the winds - and international law out the window - by restarting its nuclear program. Iran is a ‘Theocratic Republic’, a polite euphemism for a religious dictatorship, and by some strange quirk of fate, most of the folks doing the dictating are Muslims.

Try this: Go to World section of Google News. Count the stories that aren’t about Muslims attacking, holding hostage, or blowing something up.

I count three. One about France Telecom raising money, one about China building nuclear power plants, and one about an active volcano in Japan. So out of twenty stories on the page, seventeen are about Muslims causing trouble. That’s a lot. That’s 85% of the world’s problems. If we eliminate the volcano (acts of God aren’t really anybody’s fault) it’s 17/19 = 89.47%.

I know there are good Muslims; I’ve even met some. But you’ve got to ask yourself what makes members of this group so prone to making headlines - and making rubble, widows, and orphans. Some would suggest it’s a cultural issue, that Middle Eastern culture is just that screwed up - in fact I read a fascinating article on that subject recently which I would highly recommend. But with all due respect to Mr. de Winter, that can’t be all of it, because you’ll remember one of the folks on my little list above was an American convert.

Perhaps Islamic dogma is attractive to individuals who are already disposed towards violent acts? That would explain Mr. Anderson. It would also explain why some Muslims practice peace and some fly planes into buildings; the religion in this case would be a red herring, as in any non-selective group (and since you tend to inherit your religion with your last name, I’d say this qualifies as non-selective) you’ll inevitably have some people one each side of sane.

Unfortunately that still doesn’t quite explain why so much trouble seems to emanate from the Middle East, from Northern Africa, from the Balkans, and from Indonesia. It could simply be a statistical coincidence that these regions coincide with that religion, but that degree of correlation is difficult to dismiss out of hand. If there’s no causal linkage, you’d think there’d be at least one Christian or Hindu or Buddhist world flash-point. Of course, one might mention India and Pakistan here, or Israel and the Palestinian movement, but most independent observers would agree that these situations are largely Muslim aggression against a state with relative freedom of religion. This makes it difficult to to call these Hindu or Judaic problems, as there are Muslims in both India and Israel who are free to practice their religion without any threat from the state.

Again: I don’t want to be racist. But what other conclusions can you draw? The bulk of the world’s problem seem to be caused by Muslims, and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that this is incidental. I’d really appreciate it if someone out there could provide a nice, logical reason why I’m wrong, because I’d really like to find one.