Some Interesting Facts for These Times

To the Editor:

            Here are some facts that seem to need emphasis in these troubling times. It would be useful, it seems to me, to keep them in mind.

            The death toll of those killed by jihadist terrorists, since Sept. 11, 2001, is about 45 people. The death toll in attacks led by those motivated by white supremacist and other extremist ideologies, is about 48 people. This according to New America, an organization located in Washington, D.C.

            In 1994, an American born Israeli physician, Baruch Goldstein, killed 29 Muslims, including 7 children, while wounding 125 in Hebron. In 2011, Anders Behring Breivik, self-proclaimed “100% Christian,” killed 77 Muslim immigrants in Norway, including 55 teenagers.

            On April 19, 1995, Tim McVeigh, a caucasian U.S. citizen and Army veteran, who thought of himself as a Christian revolutionary, bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring over 600, making his attack the deadliest terror attack in the U.S. before 9/11 and making it even now the greatest act of domestic terror ever committed on U.S. soil.

            A recent Gallup Poll found that 58% of Christians, 52% of Jews, and 43% of the non-religious thought it justified “sometimes” to target and kill civilians, while 21% of Muslims also agreed with this.

            These are just some facts. Readers can make of them what they will. But they are facts in any case.