Going off on a tangent here about the ‘religion of peace.’
When discussing migration to Europe the relative crime rates of muslim immigrants often pop up, so once I decided to sit down and look them over. In Denmark, which keep pretty meticulous statistics, migrants from muslim countries have a roughly 2.5x higher violent crime rate than the mean. This might sound like a lot but then I started comparing it with other countries:
If we just look at homicides (the crime statistic that most people care about and which is hardest to fake), Denmark has a very low level (1 pr 100 000 inhabitants pr year), and most middle eastern countries have one of 2 to 3 if we exclude the ones currently engaged in civil war. So the rate of migrants was actually exactly what you should expect if people kept to their cultural norms.
Now compare this to places like the US ( 6 pr 100 000), or mexico (almost 30). Even if we look at the state of Minnesota which was mainly settled by Scandinavians we find a rate of 3, higher than most peaceful middle eastern countries.
If you look further east to Malaysia and Indonesia you will find even lower homicide rates. Malaysia has around 1/5th the rate of neighboring Thailand.
Though there might be more reasons for these statistics, it does strike me that Islam might be a religion of peace in as far as it has found a simple ‘peace heuristic’ that make people less likely to kill each other than in other comparatively wealthy or well functioning places.
Going off on a tangent here about the ‘religion of peace.’
When discussing migration to Europe the relative crime rates of muslim immigrants often pop up, so once I decided to sit down and look them over. In Denmark, which keep pretty meticulous statistics, migrants from muslim countries have a roughly 2.5x higher violent crime rate than the mean. This might sound like a lot but then I started comparing it with other countries:
If we just look at homicides (the crime statistic that most people care about and which is hardest to fake), Denmark has a very low level (1 pr 100 000 inhabitants pr year), and most middle eastern countries have one of 2 to 3 if we exclude the ones currently engaged in civil war. So the rate of migrants was actually exactly what you should expect if people kept to their cultural norms.
Now compare this to places like the US ( 6 pr 100 000), or mexico (almost 30). Even if we look at the state of Minnesota which was mainly settled by Scandinavians we find a rate of 3, higher than most peaceful middle eastern countries.
If you look further east to Malaysia and Indonesia you will find even lower homicide rates. Malaysia has around 1/5th the rate of neighboring Thailand.
Though there might be more reasons for these statistics, it does strike me that Islam might be a religion of peace in as far as it has found a simple ‘peace heuristic’ that make people less likely to kill each other than in other comparatively wealthy or well functioning places.