Reply #24: Consider the numbers.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

"Half a million Al Quaeda people" is about 1 in every 2000-3000 muslims. I'm quite sure the number of active members of Al-Quaeda is massively lower than 500,000. It wouldn't surprise me if there were that many people who sympathised with them and would be willing to assist them if asked, but I imagine the number of people who have actually had any form of contact whatsoever with Al Quaeda is significantly smaller than that - not necessarily by many orders of magnitude if you count "expressed support on a chatroom", but definately by many orders of magnitude if you count "actually done anything".

"Half a million Mossad people" is about 1 in every 20-30 Jews. I imagine that the fraction of Israeli Jews who would be willing to assist Mossad if asked is well above 1 in 20, but that the fraction who have actually been asked is much smaller than that. For Jews outside Israel, the fraction who would even be willing to cooperate if asked is probably significantly smaller than 1/20, and the fraction who have actually been asked will be orders of magnitude smaller still.


If the BBC had been giving its "editorial voice" to the comments, I think that would be fairly clear evidence of anti-semitism. Interviewing someone who voiced them, however, is quite a different matter, in my view.