Part of the problem we have with talking about anything is achieving an agreed sense of perspective on what we are talking about.

Recall my piece about cycling and risk:

It all boils down to our old friend ‘striking a balance’. As a society we have proclaimed that ‘using a handheld mobile phone while driving’ is a criminal offence even if it does no harm to anyone and no accident is caused. However, using a carphone is not an offence. Eating a sandwich while driving is not an offence. Driving a heavy lump of metal at 60 miles an hour on most country roads is not an offence. We accept higher levels of risk and some ‘avoidable’ deaths as the price we pay for moving about and getting things done rather faster.

To this extent it is a phony silly argument to say in any context that “the law must be tightened – if only one life is saved, that’s worth it!“. We overwhelmingly reject that argument by not imposing a 10 mph speed-limit on all roads all the time.

To put it another way. Every year UK drivers drive a total something like 250 BILLION miles – to the moon and back 500,000 times. Along the way there must be hundreds of millions of avoidable distractions that in fact cause no harm at all.

In an important sense it is pure luck whether any given distraction at whatever level of avoidability leads to a crash. Yes, it’s reasonably predictable that getting distracted will cause some accidents. But whether any given distraction causes an accident in a given case is often down to chance. This also applies to diplomacy: why don’t clever diplomats spot ‘obvious’ looming political dramas such as the collapse of communism or the Arab Spring?

In other words, it’s possible that the number of cycling deaths is rising AND that cycling is getting much safer! The ‘safety’ of cycling can be measured in terms of the number of accidents involving cyclists as compared to the number of miles driven in cars. If more people take to their bikes, more cyclists may die EVEN IF more car-drivers are driving far more miles AND being far more careful when it comes to cyclists. There are just more cyclist/car interactions happening, a tiny proportion of which will end up badly for one reason or another.

Look at it another way. If only one person cycled on a lonely country road and pulled off the road when a car was coming, the number of fatalities would plummet to zero. Would that show that cycling is now far safer, to the point of being absolutely safe? No.

So, how safe are women on the UK’s railway network?

Horror! The number of reported sex assault incidents in one year has shot up by a HUGE 21%! From 925 to 1117. Quick, we (sic) must ACT to tackle this ghastly scourge. Bring in women-only carriages.

What do these numbers tell us about the safety of women on UK trains? Basically, nothing at all.

To work out what is happening you need to factor in all sorts of, you know, facts. Put aside issues (tricky in themselves) of how far formal reports of such assaults represent the actual number of actual assaults. Look instead at changes in the numbers of men and women taking train journeys and the overall number of journeys taken over time. If far more men and women are taking train journeys, then the number of sex assaults may have risen but by less than one might have expected. In other words, rail journeys in this sense could be getting safer for women EVEN THOUGH the number of assaults has risen. Without a careful analysis, we just don’t know one way or the other.

Put it another way. There must be billions or even trillions of small interactions between men and women on the UK’s train system every year. Yet only a thousand or so actual assaults are reported. In other words, the number of assaults is (arguably) statistically insignificant. By any normal measure of ‘safety’ since trains were invented, rail journeys in the UK are overwhelmingly safe for women (and indeed for men) in every possible respect (other than getting somewhere on time). By any standard of the safety of women at any time in human history anywhere on Earth, women on the UK’s trains are stunningly if not amazingly safe, in part because we have laws and procedures in place (including prosecution of those odious offenders who can not behave themselves) to achieve that outcome. The sheer smallness of the numbers of reported assaults shows exactly that. This is not a problem. It’s a civilisational triumph.

Yet that’s not how it is presented. Behold Ellie Cosgrave in the Guardian, alas the victim of a sexual assault herself:

This problem is so much wider and deeper than a one-off grope on the tube. The sexism that sees women assaulted on public transport is the same sexism that permits street and workplace harassment; that keeps women out of boardrooms; that tells girls what careers are and are not acceptable for them and what toys they should play with; that sees women’s bodies objectified throughout the media.

In other words misogyny! The patriarchy! It’s so much wider. These assaults howsoever big or small are all part of a deeper, inexorable pervasive pattern! You can’t look at them in mansplaining isolation with all these so-called fancy ‘facts’ and regression analyses. In fact even to try to do so is ipso facto proof of sexism and, yes, patriarchy. QED!

The curious thing about the people who typically make this argument is that they absolutely deny its logical validity when it comes to Islamism and violence by Muslims.

No-one seriously disputes that the ‘great majority’ of the world’s Muslims want a quiet life and behave in a decent, even praiseworthy way. However, within Islam there is a virulent strain of active fanaticism going back centuries. No other religion has anything like this today. A smallish proportion of those fanatics want to commit violence against infidels, and a small proportion of them actually get round to committing such violence.

But it’s much more than that. There is a widespread tendency among normal mainstream Muslims to believe things that are 100% incompatible with modern liberal-minded tolerant existence. Such as the idea that anyone abandoning Islam has to be killed:

It is clear quite clear that under Islamic Law an apostate must be put to death. There is no dispute on this ruling among classical Muslim or modern scholars.

It is blindingly obvious that in a global Islamic culture that sees religion in such revolting absolutist terms where scores if not hundreds of millions of people including sizeable numbers in our own society want anyone leaving Islam to be killed, extremism of one shape or another directed against non-believers is going to have an easy time finding roots and sanctuary.

This is why the staggering events in Paris matter. They represent the start of a dawning awareness of collective responsibility across the Western political classes that maybe there is indeed an explicitly evil ideological threat lurking in significant quantities within even moderate Islamic communities that needs confronting as such. French Socialist Deputy Malek Boutih has an impeccable record on racism:

Everyone understood that the confrontation line is not between cultures but between democracy and those people: Islamo-Nazis … There is something going on in the order of the realization that no party, including my own, can claim. It is beyond emotion!

I am Charlie is more than an emotion … it’s democracy stronger than the IslamoNazism of terrorists

Dan Hannan:

Anti-racism was the card that trumped everything else: free speech, free contract, free association. Because most religious minorities in Europe were also ethnic minorities, Leftists tended to avert their eyes from things they would otherwise have criticized: inequality between the sexes, discrimination against gay people, sectarianism.

In doing so, they were guilty of the offense they most loathed in others: prejudice. For they were making the elementary mistake of lumping all minorities together. They tiptoed around Islamist violence because they assumed that an unequivocal denunciation — a denunciation unaccompanied by qualifiers about white racism and Palestinian kids and yada yada — would offend Muslims per se rather than just apologists for terrorism.

Conservatives, of course, have few such hangups. We approve of civility, and find papers like Charlie Hebdo tiresome, childish and obnoxious. But we also know that their obnoxiousness is the flip-side of religious freedom. If you are free to practice your faith, I must be free to laugh at it.

In recent years, in Europe at any rate, a large chunk of the population lost sight of that principle. If the Paris monstrosity has brought some of them back to their senses, then a tiny bit of good might have come of this foul business.

In short, progressive types, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t insist that tiny numbers of sex assaults ‘prove’ patriarchy and in the same breath hoot that Islamist killings have ‘nothing to do’ with Islam. In each case you need to look at the actual numbers, and put them in the context of actual numbers.

Islamist extremism is not in fact a problem like cycling deaths or railway assaults, where the absolute number of bad things happening is small in a context of wider safety. The context is quite different. The absolute number of supposedly ‘moderate’ Muslims holding illiberal oppressive views capable of spiralling off into some or other form of active extremism against non-Muslims, or even against Muslims who reject their ideology, is orders of magnitude higher, EVEN IF it is far less than a majority of Muslims taken as a whole and EVEN IF the number of Islamist attacks and murders is still relatively small.

We have seen what happens if a tiny handful of Muslim fanatics get AK47s and shoot up a newspaper office and a Jewish supermarket in Paris. Muslims too were among their victims. This, so we are solemnly told, ‘shows’ that Islam can not possibly be part of the problem here.

That view is now utterly discredited. Above all Muslims themselves are having to confront a grim truth: that Islam itself as currently practised may contain toxic elements:

“It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma (multinational community of Muslim believers) to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible! That thinking – I am not saying ‘religion’ but ‘thinking’ – that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world!

“Is it possible that 1.6 billion [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants – that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live? Impossible! … I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution.

You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move… because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost – and it is being lost by our own hands.

The authors of this article see the deeper sense of this amazing speech by Egypt’s President Al-Sisi:

Why did the West completely ignore what should have been a welcome call for a religious revolution? No doubt many have reservations – as they should – about someone whose rise to power was hardly an exercise in Jeffersonian democracy.

 But they miss the point. More significant than the speaker’s identity was what he understood about the receptivity of his audience.
Sisi believed that the imams would “get it.” He felt that enough citizens in the oldest and most populous state in the Muslim Middle East care about what the rest of the world thinks, and are unhappy that their faith is generally reviled and detested. Islam could change its image, but only after a reconstruction – a revolution, as Sisi called it – that would have to come from the clergy.

Yup. Sane Muslims will see what needs to be done and then try to summon the courage to start to do it well before grovelling Western media types and their ‘progressive’ fanbase, who STILL – despite the events in Paris – duck and weave and squirm over showing some puny cartoons.