The propaganda emitted by.........ahhh..........certain 'special interests'.......in the US would have you believe that Iran is 'the leading state sponsor of terrorism.' That claim is repeated endlessly (which is one of the leading signs of propaganda. Surprise!!)
Anyhow, the US Government's very own index makes Iran into a second-rate "sponsor."
...The place to test the claim is the data the State Department itself publishes — the statistical annex to Country Reports on Terrorism, and before it Patterns of Global Terrorism, the congressionally mandated series that has catalogued international terrorist incidents year by year since 1990. When you actually read those tables, a different picture emerges from the one sold on cable [read: FOX] news. ...
Year after year across 2004–2023, the most active and lethal groups are Sunni: the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda and its affiliates, al-Shabaab, the TTP. On the order of nine in ten attacks in the reporting trace back to Sunni extremist actors operating out of the Salafi-jihadist tradition. None of them answer to Tehran. Most regard Shia Muslims — Iran very much included — as heretics, and target them accordingly. ISIS has spent years at open war with Iran and its allies....
It's not just the US State Department, either.
...A separate French dataset, compiled by FONDAPOL over a longer 1979–April 2024 window, lands in the same place. The five deadliest Islamist groups over that period account for better than 80 percent of all victims of Islamist terrorism — and every one of the five is Sunni: the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and al-Qaeda....
FYI, the Sunnis are in charge of Saudi Arabia. Those of you with memory know that Saudi Arabia is the home-country of Bin Laden. The people of New York City remember his name.
Yet Trump continues to say Iran is the Number 1 threat to the I.S, Risible.
ReplyDeleteThe quoted article is confusing and equating two quite different claims:
ReplyDelete1) x is the #1 state sponsor of terrorism.
2) y is the major source of terrorism.
The article claims that if x≠y, 1 is false. That doesn't at all follow logically. We can imagine, for example, a third sort of terrorism that is not even Islamist -- say Mormons became a notable terrorist group. If Utah began pumping more money into a Mormon terrorist organization than Iran does into its proxies, 1 would be true as "Utah is the #1 state sponsor of terrorism" even though most terrorism worldwide was not Mormon at all (as indeed it is not; almost no terrorism is Mormon in fact).
I think it is true that Iran is the #1 state sponsor of terrorism, similarly. Yes, there is more Sunni terror than Shia terror; Sunni Islam is far larger than Shia Islam. But of state sponsors, only Iran is more or less wholly devoted to the program (and Syria, if it had been the main conduit of money to Sunni terrorism, is under new management that at least for now seems willing to play along with us). Shia terrorism may be smaller than Sunni in total dollars, but there are no remaining Sunni states that support terrorism as comprehensively as Iran does its proxies.
Proposition 1 could have a different x, though, depending on how you define "terrorism." China's grey zone fishing fleets, for example; if they were defined as a species of terrorism, it might qualify. Or, under certain definitions, the United States itself might.