new letter published

Your letter strikes me as the mirror image of the cartoon. If the artist has played fast and loose with empirical reality in order to promulgate his preconceived idea, surely the same might be said of your response. Your summer vacation in one corner of the Muslim world cannot possibly provide you, as you claim, with the evidence to assert that “the vast majority of citizens of Muslim countries want nothing other than peace and justice in the world” nor that “many Muslim countries today are filled predominantly with everyday people who have more in common with you and me than with the terrorists depicted in McKee’s stereotyping cartoon.” These sweeping, unsupported antitheses are logically no more defensible on their own than McKee’s theses, which one could certainly muster anecdotal evidence to support. There are obvious criticisms to be made of the naive positivism of opinion polling, but since you make the claims about majorities and predominance, you do invite the question of what exactly you rely on to make such assertions. Do you believe that roughly equal proportions of American citizens and adherents of Islam wish ill on the United States? In exactly which regards is your posited median Muslim more similar to me than to an extremist? It would be facile to point out that any two people are almost infinitely similar and dissimilar, but limiting ourselves to the topic of your letter, you would have to yield that on some questions (the admissibility of suicide bombing against civilians, say) the median Muslim is much closer to al-Qaeda than to Augusta. I admit more sympathy for your (let us even say “our”) “side” than for McKee’s, but I can’t see how the quantitative claims follow from such an opinion.