About that “Ugly” Heritage Incident
June 17th, 2014




Dana Milbank says that a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation turned “ugly” yesterday when a Muslim student named Saba Ahmed from American University tried to defend the honor of Islam:

“We portray Islam and all Muslims as bad, but there’s 1.8 billion followers of Islam,” she said. “We have 8 million-plus Muslim Americans in this country and I don’t see them represented here.”

Without engaging on Ahmed’s larger point, her use of “8 million” Muslim Americans is something of a tell. Back in 2001, the popular claim was that there were only “7 million” Muslim Americans, but when I looked into where that number came from, it turned out to be nothing more than an activist talking point. There are no hard-counts on the number of Americans who practice Islam. The best estimates from disinterested sociologists put the number somewhere between 1.1 million and 1.8 million.

Now, that was 13 years ago. But I doubt the Muslim population has grown by more than 400 percent since then.



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  5. Fake Herzog June 18, 2014 at 11:40 am

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  7. Nedward June 19, 2014 at 2:07 am

    There’s rounding up going around–the richest .01% somehow became the richest 1%; 8 million people suddenly got health insurance out of nowhere; illegals number between 5 and 15 (!) percent of the population, depending on what sounds most ominous in the context. Of course I remember back when 1 out of 4 women was raped at least once in her lifetime, particularly during the Super Bowl, and 1 out of 10 men AND women was a homosexual, both posing strange demographic implications if true

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