Misunderstanding Islam

Convictions in Oxfordshire + National Reporting does not an accurate picture make

Recently, we tripped over a public conversation with achap who seemed to convinced in the alignment of paedophilia with Islam off the back of one particular conviction of a gang for child rape offences aligned to a paedophile ring, some of whom were from allegedly Muslim descent.

The Trigger for Education

You don’t usually have to wait long until one bigoted comment is posted. So of course, I started the engine and away we went.

Comparing Apples with Pears is Bananas

“OK, let’s play.

What (Nameo) appears to have a problem with, is the spelling of the word “Paedophile”. That doesn’t have a single ‘M’ in it, let alone 2. It does take the P’s though, twice.

The first graph shows the percentage of people identifying as Muslim’s in the last census. It has a higher percentage of Muslims living in the city than the UK average at 10,320 of 151,906 residents. A total of 6.8% of the population compared to 5%, which is the national average.

What we therefore have to see in the total crime figures for paedophilia, is a “greater than chance” adjustment in the number of crimes committed by muslims (i.e. even as a simple rule of thumb, it has to increase the paedophilia rate in Oxford by more than 36%, given the gap between the national average and Oxford’s population. So let’s look at the police figures).

The number of reported crimes in Oxfordshire was 107 in total in 2015/16, up from 64 the year before, which is a pretty big increase. It looks like a 67% increase. As a percentage of the population of Oxford this comes out at 70 such crimes per 100,000 population in the area. However, this is not enough to blame it on muslims, since it’s an aggregate figure of all ethnicity, and it tells us nothing about who is perpetrating them. Now we’ve got to ask ourselves who is perpetrating these crimes?

Well, those exact figures are harder to come by (so you’ll get combination of the Catholic Church with any “muslims” who may have committed the crimes), but since this is a newspaper article, we can still do a like-for-like comparison with articles (because it’s an article, which will tell us something about the readership who believe it) by comparing an aggregate source of other articles and reports from a single UK Databases covering all these stories in Oxfordshire.

The UK Database — A list of articles for convicted paedophiles

The following link takes you to the page for Oxfordshire. As you can see, the first page itself hasn’t got a single “Muslim” name on it (as of 2nd April 2017).

https://theukdatabase.com/category/oxfordshire/

Simply counting up the total number of crimes between 12th March 2012 (the date the database started collating articles) and today, we see a total of 303 crimes of child sexual exploitation, grooming, possession of indecent images, sex with a minor etc. etc.

The number of crimes committed by “Muslims”, wait for it, 13. The rest were white British born, bar 5 who were EU born. Which puts the real ratio of crimes committed by “Muslims” (even just judging on names — though I know at least two of those are Indian. Let’s assume Indian Muslims to give the premise that Muslims carry out such crimes the best possible chance) at 4.29%. Hence, it does not even reach the proportion needed to break-even let alone come to the conclusion (Nameo) is coming to.

Now, it doesn’t end there.

Determining Islam by Individual Name

The other problem is that people find it difficult to determine whether someone is muslim or not. Here are some names from the “muslim” list:

• Mohammed Mehmood
• Nurul Islam
• Birendra Limbu
• Ghausel Tarakhail

It’s not clear who of them are actually Muslim. I just included them to give [Nameo’s] figures the best possible chance. So 4.29% is the absolute maximum it can be, since it can only go down, and it doesn’t even make up the break-even distance.

So even looking at the larger list of names, can you spot a pattern? It’s unlikely, but many of the “Muslim” names are Pakistani. The Arabic equivalent is “Mahmood” for “Mehmood” for example, in the above list. So names are an unreliable identifier for Muslims, since for all you or we know, you could just be referring to Pakistani’s and are using the word “Muslim” as a proxy. Indians are Muslims, Indonesians are Muslims, Arabs are Muslims, Kosovan’s are Muslims, indeed Islam has a really broad appeal (as shown in the map [below]).

This leaves the question or statement to be reworded at best, as this:

“Why do some cultures “disproportionately” commit paedophilia?”

And as we’ve seen from the figures, that reported disproportion is [statistically] skewed towards “white people” [in the UK] not Asians, definitely not Muslims, nor even foreigners.

Visceral Conditioning

The problem is that people read and remember stuff that induces a visceral reaction within them, usually on something they don’t understand. Crunching the numbers cuts through all of that. However, given our generally low level of mathematical literacy, that is too much to expect from the UK populous.

It’s been a pleasure to educate you!”

Fact checking, since like, forever! Names changed because maybe they learned something? One chance.