Terra incognita

Richard Landes at the Augean Stables has some graphs show the comparative casualty footprint of various conflicts. But it shows more than that,  it describes not just how the world is, but more importantly, how we insist on not seeing it.

As any damned fool can see, the Israel-Palestine problem is the major problem facing the world today.

Recently, Newsweek published an interactive map of the State of Islam which aimed to showed its variety and demonstrate that not every place was a hotbed of extremism.  The entries on the map which throw a revealing light on the way the editors think — or don’t think. One of the countries in Newweek’s world of Islam is the Philippines which is reported as having a a great deal of religious freedom — indeed the highest on the magazine’s map. The Philippines is 90% Christian.  According to Wikipedia, “about 90% of Filipinos identify themselves as Christians, with 81% belonging to the Roman Catholic Church and 5% composing of Protestant denominations, and 4% comprising of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Iglesia Ni Cristo, Philippine Independent Church, Seventh Day Adventist, United Church of Christ, among others.” But India, which has one of the largest Muslim populations on earth, is completely absent from Newsweek’s map. How does a major magazine create an illustration which puts a solidly Christian country in the Islamic world while omitting the country with one of the largest, if not the largest population of Muslims? This kind of mental incapacity, bordering almost on ignorance, is supposed to be more characteristic of retarded conservatives than of smooth, cosmopolitan progressive people. Yet it is upon this kind of ignorance that policy is made. The maps shown by Landes and shown on Newsweek don’t show the world as it is; they represent the mental landscape of the Left.  Recently I received a map from a friend that was meant to be a joke. At least we knew it was joke.