Some statistics
Reader comment on item: One-on-one with Daniel Pipes

Submitted by Bucephalus (United States), Dec 8, 2003 at 00:39

Daniel Pipes says: "Statistics Denmark does, however, produce are numbers on immigrants from Third World countries and their descendants, which it reports makes up five percent of the population; and it is known that Muslims make up four-fifths of this element. The latest police figures show that 76.5 percent of convicted rapists in Copenhagen belong to that five percent of the population, and from that we drew our understated conclusion."

But these statistics are not meaningful by themselves.

Suppose that Muslim proportion of the convicted rapists reflects the Muslim proportion of the 3rd world immigration population. That would mean Muslim immigrants account for 60% of convicted rapists in Denmark (= 75% x 80%). That, in turn, means that both Muslim and non-Muslim immigrants have approximately the same tendency to produce rapists. Muslim immigrants are 4% of the Danish population but 60% of the rapists (under our assumption); non-Muslim immigrants are 1% of the Danish population but 15% of the convicted rapists. In both cases, the ratio is 15:1. So unless someone can provide the actual breakdown of the religious affiliation of convicted rapists, the data cited by Daniel Pipes say absolutely nothing about Muslim immigrants, as opposed to immigrants in general, and this inference about Muslim immigrants is simply invalid.

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Daniel Pipes replies:

Go to http://www.danielpipes.org/article/450 to see the context of this argument. It is not whether Muslim immigrants are more crime-prone than other immigrants but whether they "make up a majority of the country's convicted rapists."