Just in case people are still in a state of euphoria over Rumsfeld being booted out and possibly prosecuted, here's some very worrying news. MI5, the UK's equivalent to the FBI, is apparently monitoring around 1600 British Muslims who are suspected of plotting around 30 terrorist attacks. Using wikipedia's figure of 1.5 million for Britain's Muslim population, that means roughly 1 in 1000 Muslims is being monitored as a suspected terrorist. That seems like such a high number that I've been thinking about it.

Can 1 out of every 1000 Muslims really be a terrorist? Let's assume that out of any group of four Muslims, one is conservative, one is progressive, one is somewhere in the middle and one is religiously indifferent (this is roughly based on my own personal experience, not a scientific survey; but in almost all issues, the average person seems to be middle of the road or indifferent). Out of the conservative 25%, my feeling is that about half are strongly opposed to violence. This leaves about 12.5% of any Muslim population which could be considered sympathetic with terrorism. But there are a lot of shades of gray within this group; a very large number are pissed off about Palestine, Iraq and Chechnya, but I have never personally met anyone who claimed that they were actually willing to violently protest these issues by targetting innocent civilians. So I suspect that the number willing to actually commit violence is much less than 1% of the terrorist-sympathetic group. That does result in a maximum figure of 0.125%, or 1 out of 800. Interestingly, that's quite similar to what MI5 is suspecting. These figures roughly compare to the much reported Times poll on Muslim attitudes to terrorism:

Six per cent of British Muslims believe that the 7/7 bombers were acting according to the true principles of Islam, while 7 per cent agree that suicide attacks on civilians in Britain can be justified under certain circumstances, a figure that rises to 16 per cent if the target is the military.

Here's the thing, though; I wonder to what extent the above could be applied to any population? I wonder how the 1 per thousand figure compare with MI5 estimates of the number of IRA terrorists among the Irish population during the 1980's.  A certain percentage of any population will be violent extremists of some sort. The problem right now though, as the MI5 report mentions, is that the UK's foreign policy in Palestine and Iraq has ensured that it's Muslims.