Some practical statistics

[chickenfeet]

Lord Stevens claims 3000 British based Muslims have been through Al Quaeda training camps.

Let's see:

There are 1.6 million Muslims in Britain, of which half, one assumes, are female and unlikely to attend AQ camps. So, 800,000 males.

At least a quarter of those must be too young to have had terrorist training so let's say 600,000 adult males.

So 1 in 200 adult British Muslim males have left the country for terrorist training?

I have my doubts.

Comments

[tanuja.livejournal.com]

This is what happens when people randomly throw out statistics, people like yourself and my husband go "eh, that can't be right" and actually make the effort to work out what the statistics actually mean, before commenting on the viability of the comment. I simply think "oh that's crap", but don't bother with the next step.

So hats off to people like yourself and Mr Tanuja who make the effort to prove the stats are crap, and also to prove that 82% of statistics are made up on the spot ;)

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I guess it's what happens when one has been a consultant for twenty five years. testing the reasonableness of data becomes second nature. Perhaps it's the difference between consultants and accountants {snerk}. My employer once got my tax deduction wrong by a factor of three or so. I worked out that it was clearly wrong by approximation in ten seconds. It took the office accountant fifteen minutes to convince himself that I was right because he couldn't accept it until he had worked the correct answer out to the exact penny.

[frankie-ecap.livejournal.com]

C'est un gendarme blond.

Nice, thank you.

[tanuja.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it's the difference between consultants and accountants {snerk}.

To my utter shame, I have no response to this.... :oops: :)

The office accountant sounds like several people I have worked with. Fortunately, Treasury is much more, er, reasonable.

[blonde222.livejournal.com]

I know you will all laugh at me for being like the accountant and splitting hairs but the 1.6m Muslims doesn't count all the people who might hold British passports but who were not in England and Wales on census day in 2001, but instead were elsewhere (maybe even in AQ camps?!) This can lead to significant deviation in the true numbers of all those who might be considered "British-based". This is especially the case for countries in the Commonwealth where migration and dual nationality are common.

Viz the dreaded KiltGuy: technically a Canadian citizen, has a passport and ID card etc, would be the first to wave his Canadian nationality around if ever drafted into anything unpleasant in the UK, but has visited The Big Maple only three times in the last ten years.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Even if the number of British based Muslims were double, it would stil be an astonishingly high number.

[blonde222.livejournal.com]

True, and even if there were 1500 who had been through AQ camps, it would be too many for my liking.

Three months ago I would have agreed with you that Lord Stevens estimate seemed rather high. But there was a documentary I saw when in the UK last month called Don't Panic I'm Islamic which I initially interpreted as an attempt to reassure the general non-Muslim population that Muslim Britons were not nearly as scary or extremist as some fear. But actually, the opinions expressed by all those Muslims interviewed in the documentary were so extreme, and frankly so departed from reality ("I am 99% certain that 9/11 was orchestrated by George Bush"; "Everyone knows that Osama is innocent" etc etc) that some of this scaremongering no longer seems preposterous.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

True, and even if there were 1500 who had been through AQ camps, it would be too many for my liking.

Absolutely. 100 would be at least 99 too many.

the opinions expressed by all those Muslims interviewed in the documentary were so extreme

You can find people to say anything if that's what you want for a documentary. I bet I could easily find a dozen, apparently respectable, middle class Brits, in the leafier suburbs who have never actually met a Muslim but "know" that they are all extremists planning to bomb whatever.

Look at the average Tory party conference!

What I would really like to know is how widespread pro AQ views are and by what vectors they are being spread. Unfortunately, having seen at first hand the utter political ineptitude of the so-called "intelligence" services when it comes to differentiating between different strands of dissent, I doubt that will happen. I mean if they can't tell the difference between the CPGB M-L and the Militant Tendency, how the heck can you expect them to unravel the complexities of the different strands of militant Islam?

[blonde222.livejournal.com]

Also true, also true. But one would assume that the people who are most likely to resort to violence would not be the people volunteering to appear on a BBC2 documentary. In other words, there are people out there who we should be even more afraid of.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I'm sceptical about anything said on documentaries since being at a meeting of the Labour Co-ordinating Committee that was filmed by Panorama. At least that's what they thought they filmed. What they got and broadcast was staged. The real meeting happened after the cameras left.

[blonde222.livejournal.com]

like the "meeting" between the Labor Minister and the trade unionists that appeared on Paris's Olympic bid video. Clearly bogus. But these were long interviews, done one on one, shot in a closed studio. I thought they were quite chilling.