Anyone whoโs followed this guy for a while knows his usual routine: giant collage of screenshots from whatever papers he can grab, a confident caption about whatever it is he's trying to prove, and no serious engagement with what the authors actually say. It gives the impression of doing serious research, but itโs really just tossing pictures of studies around and hoping no one reads them closely.
Unfortunately for him, I happened to have some free time over the past few hours (and nothing better to do). I used an AI to pull the relevant passages from Fishโs work, then went back and checked everything against the actual articles and book chapters myself.
So here's what's happening:
Firstly, Mike seems to assume that any pattern or correlation that remains after some โcontrolsโ establishes a causal relationship. But controls donโt automatically create a clean, lab-like comparison. They just adjust for a few broad differences on paper (things like income or political system). Sometimes that helps clarify what might be causing a pattern. Other times, it barely scratches the surface because real-world outcomes are shaped by things you simply canโt โcontrol awayโ with a few variables: history, conflict, foreign intervention, state stability, regional dynamics, and so on. Researchers know this, and theyโre careful about how far they push their claims. Mike clearly isnโt.
Fish himself is very clear about this. In his article on large-scale political violence he flat-out says that he and his co-authors:
โcannot pretend to resolve the weighty question at hand or to make causal inferencesโ
And that their findings are only:
โa starting pointโ given the limits of the data.
In other words: these studies are early attempts to map out a complicated issue, not a solid case for โIslam leads to X.โ But Mike talks as if once a pattern survives a few controls, the explanation is already obvious. He never really stops to ask whether those patterns might be shaped by where many Muslim-majority countries are located in the first place: places shaped by post-colonial borders, proxy wars, foreign intervention, weak states, and long-running regional conflicts.
So heโs clearly confused about what โcontrolling forโ something can actually do. Adding GDP or a democracy score to a model doesnโt erase all those deeper forces, it just adjusts for a couple of broad differences on paper. It doesnโt recreate history or hold everything constant. And with some types of data, that kind of adjustment barely works at all, as youโll see below from Fish himself.
The terrorism chapter
Now to the slides Mike posted from the terrorism chapter of "Are Muslims Distinctive?" The part he thinks really nails his point.
From that chapter, he quotes Fishโs stats on high-casualty bombings (1994โ2008):
โโฆself-proclaimed Islamists have been responsible for over three-fifths of all incidents and nearly seven-tenths of all deaths. Terrorism is not a uniquely Muslim disease, but its perpetrators in recent times are disproportionately Islamists.โ
Fish adds:
โMuslims may be prone to tolerate terrorism in the name of their religion, which in turn points our attention to explanations for Islamist terrorism that have a religious dimension.โ
So there is something to explain. But here is what Mike doesnโt tell you, even though itโs on the very same pages heโs drawing from.
Fish immediately warns that the kind of statistical analysis he uses in other parts of the book doesnโt really work for these bombings:
โStatistical analyses of the type that we conduct on many other matters in this book would be less useful here. โฆ our units are neither people nor countries nor country-specific events, and it would be difficult to control for factors that may influence the incidence of terrorist bombings.โ
In simple terms:
In other chapters, Fish is comparing countries or people, where you can at least try to line them up on income, regime type, region, etc.
In this chapter, the โunitโ is each bombing, and most of those bombings are piled up in a few places that are already on fire: civil wars, insurgencies, occupations, failed states.
To โcontrol forโ things properly here, youโd need:
- countries that are equally poor
- equally authoritarian
- with equally deep wars and foreign interference
- that differ mainly in religion
In reality, we donโt have neat pairs like โMuslim Afghanistan vs non-Muslim Afghanistanโ or โMuslim Iraq vs non-Muslim Iraqโ (Iโm not saying we need โcloneโ countries for this to work, but you get the idea). The worst war zones are mostly Muslim countries, and war and the terrorism feed into each other. If you throw โcivil war: yes/noโ into the model, youโre partly controlling away the very conflict that produces the bombings in the first place.
Thatโs why Fish says the usual style of analysis โwould be less useful hereโ and that itโs โdifficult to controlโ for the drivers of these bombings. Heโs basically saying this shows what happened in that period, not the result of a clean, controlled comparison.
He also underlines how context-bound these attacks are. He points out that:
- A huge share of the bombings occur in just a handful of countries (Afghanistan, Algeria, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, Sri Lanka), and
- Islamist-claimed bombings are even more concentrated inside war and insurgency zones.
Fish notes that terrorist attacks are โmuch more likely to happen in places beset by civil wars or insurgencies than in places that are not.โ
So even as he tells you Islamists are over-represented in this kind of terrorism, heโs also telling you:
- This is about certain groups in certain wars,
- The data are not suited to a full โweโve isolated Islamโ analysis,
- Terrorism itself is โnot a uniquely Muslim disease.โ
Mikeโs move is to take that limited, heavily qualified picture and talk as if Fish had shown:
โWe controlled for everything and proved Islam leads to terrorism.โ
Fish explicitly says he cannot do that here. Mike insists on pretending he can.
Where the rest of Fishโs violence work points:
If you look at the broader research Fish is drawing on, the story is even less like Mikeโs slogan.
In the article on large-scale political violence (civil wars and big episodes of internal conflict), Fish and his co-authors โfind no evidence of a correlationโ between a higher Muslim share of the population and more deaths from that kind of violence, and they stress again that they โcannotโฆ make causal inferencesโ and see their results as a โstarting point.โ
On ordinary violent crime, Fish is blunt. Summarizing the homicide data, he writes:
โOne explanation we can rule out is that Muslims are violent people.โ
He notes that predominantly Muslim countries have much lower murder rates than non-Muslim countries: โmore Muslims, less homicide.โ
So from Fish you actually get three things at once:
- No special Muslim excess in deaths from big civil wars.
- Lower murder rates in Muslim-majority countries.
- A specific, modern pattern where Islamists are over-represented among certain high-casualty bombings in a small cluster of war zones. A pattern Fish himself says is hard to analyse with proper controls.
A careful reader might come away thinking: Muslims as a whole are certainly not more violent, but there is a terrorism problem around some Islamist movements in particular conflicts, shaped by a mix of political conditions, war, occupation, and state breakdown, not by Islam in isolation.
Mike turns that into a single sweeping claim that Islam is the underlying cause of all these problems.
You all need to stop using AI as if it will save you from real research. Quite simply, when it comes to complicated issues, AI will often make errors. It's fine to use AI for simple questions, but don't expect AI to address complicated issues. Always fact-check AI results.
First, the AI is simply wrong here. The peer-reviewed studies I cited did control for other variables in multivariate analyses and ran robustness checks. But worse than this is that it cites M. Steven Fish's book, "Are Muslims Distinctive?", as a way to counter my points. Obviously, this Muslim did not read this book, because he would be upset by some of its conclusions (as the AI even has to say at the bottom). And yes, Fish controlled for other variables. Check out the slides I have made using his book. All his work does is strengthen my case.
Remember, AI is not perfect. Some research has found that up to 52% of the answers AI provides contain incorrect information.