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Reprinted from Smirking Chimp
While promoting her new book, Heretic, on a March 23 episode of "The Daily Show," Somali-born author and anti-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali made a staggering claim: "If you look at 70 percent of the violence in the world today, Muslims are responsible," she told host Jon Stewart.
Stewart did not demand any evidence and Hirsi Ali provided no citation. However, she made a strikingly similar statement in a March 20 essay previewing her new book for the Wall Street Journal: "According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies," Hirsi Ali wrote in WSJ's Saturday Essay, "at least 70% of all the fatalities in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving Muslims."
I contacted the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a leading British foreign policy think tank, to inquire about the source of Hirsi Ali's statistic. According to IISS spokesperson Kat Slowe, IISS did not state such a figure in its research.
"I have spoken to a number of our experts and they cannot identify where this statistic may have come from," Slowe told me.
"Their best guess is that the journalist in question [Hirsi Ali] may have access/a subscription to the [IISS] Armed Conflict Database and may have calculated this statistic independently. There are some concerns that it could be misleading as, without Syria (near 200,000 total deaths, and almost half of last year's global conflict deaths) the figure would look massively different (and of course, this conflict did not have its root in religion)," Slowe added.
Hirsi Ali's AHA Foundation did not respond to my request for a citation on the statistic, nor did the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute that employs Hirsi Ali as a resident scholar. My email query to Hirsi Ali's personal account at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where she serves as a fellow, also went unanswered.
Around 24 hours after my initial query, Hirsi Ali publicly backed off her claim that Muslims are "responsible" for most of the violence in the world. "Depressing that 70% of fatalities in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving Muslims," she declared on her personal Twitter account.