re: Looks like Swedish officials are starting to come out supporting Trumps claims

There was a poll which Maher discussed not long ago, it said a majority of "peaceful" Muslims agree with the extremists. Yeah yeah I know, we don't believe in polls.

But the mere fact that there are so many extreme Muslim groups constantly causing issues across Mid East and Africa ought to tell you that it's more than a few "bad apples". If the "moderate" Muslims who supposedly do outnumber the extremists really wanted to, I have a hard time believing ISIS would even exist. Imagine how swiftly such an extreme and violent group of Christians would be eradicated.

The worst thing to me is the spate of "domestic terrorists" appearing. These are often Muslims who grew up in the west. Europe will have many of these in the decades to come, as it's immigrant population keeps churning out more babies.

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The differences between AQ and ISIS seem to be mostly means, not ends.

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AQ has a much more ordered and long-term vision. But I wasn't disputing the point that their ends are similar. The means being drastically different isn't inconsequential. AQ's message for a while now (aside from stop fricking killing other Muslims) has been extensive planning for large-scale operations against targets of signicance that really, really count. And their messaging to the Muslim world has specifically sought to highlight differences in doctrine, organizational maturity, and behavior between them and ISIL (well we call them ISIS now, too, but old habits). ISIL is failing at executing its central mission and retaining the ultimate justification of its leadership of global jihad--its maintenance of a physical State. They're flailing now
and will increasingly rely upon their insurgent branches across North Africa, South Asia, and East Asia to try to restore some momentum. As their foreign fighters that don't rejoin AQ-aligned movements in the Levant return to their home countries, things could get pretty dicey. They'll still be dangerous as an insurgent movement with safe haven in lots of places. But AQ is likely to re-emerge as the global leader of Sunni Jihad--soon.

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If the "moderate" Muslims who supposedly do outnumber the extremists really wanted to, I have a hard time believing ISIS would even exist. Imagine how swiftly such an extreme and violent group of Christians would be eradicated.

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Why would I need to imagine? Are you familiar with the atrocities committed by the Antibalaka militias in Central Africa, or the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda? This isn't some bullshite appeal to the Crusades, Christian militias do all kinds of heinous shite today in sub-Saharan Africa. I suspect that most Christians would be sufficiently outraged to condemn their behavior, but not sufficiently outraged to pick up a gun and go to Africa to defend Christianity's honor. They'd probably (correctly) see it as an issue of culture, not as an intrinsic fault of their religion.

Ohhh, I thought you were objecting to the gray zone part and not the low-frequency, high-impact part. I get it now.

What is amazing to me is that this whole thread is not about whether Trump was irresponsible to go on world wild television and make a general statement about crime in Sweden based on a "documentary" film clip he saw on television without any attempt at substantiation before he spoke -- but is rather an after-the-fact attempt to rationalize/justify that the irresponsible statement by Trump is somehow OK because there is some (very) arguable basis now for the statement based on a Breitbart London (clickbait) news article written in 2015.