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and welcome to the award-winning BestableF podcast with Cupsidae from D.C.O.D.C. the David Pakman show Truth to Radio on the media, the young Turks and Ted Talks.

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We've all been watching events unfold in Paris with sinking horror. Another terrorist attack, one that this time killed police and civilians and turned writers and satirists into blood and meat.

Another manhunt broadcast on TV, another set of mugshots, terrorists with Muslim names.

And let me tell the argument start again, the one the world's been having for a couple of decades now about terrorism and Islam.

To one side, it seems totally obvious that Muslims condone violence, that Islam is the problem or part of it anyway.

To the other side, it's blasphemy to even consider that idea. It's wrong to even ask, is there something about Islam that leads some of its followers to violent tactics?

These two sides are deeply entrenched, totally sure of their points of view, with no data on either side to back them up, only anecdotes.

Well today we heard about a guy who does have data, a political science professor at UC Berkeley named M. Stephen Fish. His research led to a book with this title, our Muslims distinctive a look at the evidence.

Here's a passage from the introduction to the book. It says, this book provides no definitive answers and addresses only a portion of the large issues.

But it does take on a substantial chunk of the big questions and it examines them using hard evidence. Unbiased by prejudice and unconstrained by political correctness, this book treats the assumptions about Muslims that rattle around public debate

as hypotheses rather than as unassailable truths or as unconscionable falsehoods. The book aims to shift the grounds of the debate from hot and wispy rhetoric to fact finding and hypothesis testing.

It struck us that this is exactly what we need, data, evidence, someone to decode this issue for us and Steve Fish has some answers.

So today we called him up. So I guess we'll start before we talk too much about your book and your work. Can you just answer the question for me, is Islam or Islamic cultures are they more violent than other cultures or religions?

No, Islam is not more violent inherently than other religions. Any religion, any ideology, any big idea has some people who will espouse violence to defend it.

That's true of Christianity, that's true of Marxism, that's true of Islam. But there's nothing inherently violent about Islam itself.

Now since Islam is the kind of radical political wing of Islam that seeks to establish an Islamic state is really one of the great challenges to the hegemony of the West and Western style liberalism in the world right now.

Some acts of terrorism are committed in the name of Islam the same way acts of terrorism were committed by a few rewind 50 years by say communist groups or 100 years by anarchist groups.

Or a thousand to crusades.

Sure, absolutely. So you don't even have to go back that far. And you know, there are parts of the world where self proclaimed Christians commit acts of violence.

Look at the Lord's resistance army in Uganda. This not Joseph Coney runs it and he claims to want to start a state based on the 10 commandments.

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