The Ginger Terror Threat

The chain of referrals for this item reads like the begats,  I found this via Wombat-socho's "Rule 5 Sunday: Post-Veterans Day Recovery Edition", which featured Evi L. Bloggerlady's post "Red Head White Brits 15 times more likely to convert to Radical Islam?", who in turn blamed cited Instapundit: Milo Yiannopoulos: Brietbart: "Signs of Liberal Dhimmitude: Of white British converts to radical Islam, 76% are gingers", which finally sent me to British Breitbart's Ginger Jihadis: Why Redheads are Attracted to Radical Islam:

Definitely a source of terror

Dozens of young redheaded men and women are replacing the ritual bullying of the playground with the ritual strictures of radical Islam, perhaps – at least according to some experts – as a result of the bullying and persecution they endure early in life.

You’ve likely already made the connection between ginger hair and home-grown Islamic radicals yourself. Subconsciously, perhaps, from newspaper reports showing carrot-topped wannabe jihadis from Bradford, and TV clips of auburn brothers in east London. What you probably don’t know is just how vastly over-represented redheads are in the ranks of Islamist converts.

Suicide bomber girl

There are no surveys of jihadis, of course. The Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism organisation, told us that no one keeps reliable data on white converts to Islamism. So news reports probably represent the best data set available to researchers.

We sampled national newspaper coverage of white converts to radical Islam published between 5 August 2013 and 4 August 2014, excluding cases where there was no evidence of extremism or radicalisation. For example, Lucy Vallender, the ginger-haired Territorial Army private who had a sex change and became Britain’s first transgender Muslim woman, was excluded from our results.

Now, that is scary!

We discovered that 76 per cent of white British converts to radical Islam had red hair. In the Daily Mail archives, 69 per cent of white Brits lured into jihadism or the orbit of an extremist preacher were ginger. The number was similar for the Mirror and the Telegraph. The Guardian yielded a full 100 per cent redhead rate for the stories we sampled.

These are extraordinary numbers when you consider that in northern and western Europe, the average incidence of red hair in the general population is 5 per cent. In other words, Islamic extremists reported on by the media are fifteen times more likely than the general population to have red hair.

Unless you think there’s a Fleet Street conspiracy to single out and report on ginger jihadis – and that the Guardian is leading the charge – the data clearly demonstrate that white people who convert to radical Islam are overwhelmingly likely to be ginger.

Perhaps it's the soul deficiency, or a brain disease linked to pheomelanin, but more likely it's the backlash to anti-ginger movement, spawned largely by South Park. I have it on good authority (Georgia is an authentic Ginger) that the desire to terrorize fades as the hair turns gray.

Linked at Pirates's Cove in the weekly "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup" and links. Linked at Wombat-socho's special post-Thanksgiving food coma double-stuffed Rule 5 compendium "Rule 5 Sunday: Them Ain’t Turkeys, Them Are Ducks."