However, as I was reading through the sordid account of home-spun extremists within the Bureau using their positions to spread slanderous generalizations, an example graph made the old political science student in me wince.
Yes, this graph makes no analytical sense. I see an x-axis timeline, I see a y-axis 'violence quotient', I see stars and moons and pots of gold; what I fail to see (and please correct me if I'm wrong) is anything actually being quantified. The graphic indicates that Islam reached a certain level of violence and (like a pituitary-deficient teenager) ceased to develop beyond that point. Ignoring a slew of historical counterexamples of religious violence that persists to this day and the misleading time scale, and the apparent failure to define what 'pious and devout' indicate, there's really no scale or sense of proportion. It's a badly-made graph.
And one of the things I've learned from Statistics 101 (and life, subsequently) is that a bad graph tends to indicate an underlying bad logic. Whenever a person needs to twist the truth, skew the numbers (or avoid using any altogether), or outright lie to sell a point, the point's very validity comes into question. Which makes this a perfect graph for the curriculum. It's a bad math that helps quantify the logic involved, the egregious misinterpretation of one of the world's major faiths that (as the wired article plainly states) serves no other purpose than to play into the philosophical ends of Al Qaeda. Not to be alarmist about it, of course. But I do agree that we (collectively, via our various agencies) get nothing done by building such distinctions.
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