This is a complete news item from the free British newspaper Metro:

“ONE in three terror suspects arrested in Britain last year were [sic] white, figures show.

“They totalled 91 out of 260 individuals -- 35 per cent -- of those held on terrorism-related offences, according to the Home Office.

“It was the only ethnic group to show a rise, up from 25 per cent in 2015.

“The sharpest fall was for those of Asian ethnic appearance, down 24 to 125.” -- (Metro, paper edition, March 10th, 2017.)

Now, what conclusions do readers come to after reading the above? Give yourselves a minute before reading on...

As for what I think, the above is an example one of two possible things. 1) A piece of logical imbecility. Or 2) A piece of crude propaganda.

I wouldn't have commented on this until I saw the exact same thing in a few other newspapers. This lead me to conclude that it had been fed to the press either by the Home Office or directly by the police. Either way, it's still either a piece of logical inanity or an example of political Islamophilia.

To be more concrete: the piece above is meant to tell the British public that it has more to fear from “white” terrorism than it does from “Asian” (i.e., Islamic) terrorism. Sure, that message is between the lines; though it's still blatantly there.

So let's take these politically-correct and moronic figures apart.

Firstly, the piece tells us that “ONE in three terror suspects arrested in Britain last year were [sic] white”. Does that mean that we have a problem with white terrorism in the U.K.? Absolutely not! Whites make up 81.9% of the British population. That means that the one-in-three statistic (i.e., 33/34 white terror suspects out of a 100 suspects) tells us that the number of whites arrested for terrorist-related offences is extremely small relative to the total population of whites in the UK. If anything, it should be two-in-three arrests of white people. (Some of the Islamic terrorists might have been white too and some, the African converts from Christianity, were 'black' -- where is this accounted for in the statistics? It isn't.)

But let's put this same stat in a different way.

Two-in-three terror suspects were non-white despite being only 19% of the U.K. population. What's more, virtually all non-white terror suspects would have been Muslim; not “Asian” or black/brown.

So what's the percentage of the U.K. population which is Muslim? Officially, the U.K. is 4.5% Muslim. Two-in-three of terror suspects come from 4.5% of the U.K. population. That shows that stating these facts in terms of ratios (i.e., “one-in-three” or 1/3) is very unhelpful. What's more, a statistician will tell you that this was a deliberate ploy on the part of the writers of this drivel.

Since Muslims are only 4.5% of the British population, it's hard to take the stat that whites “totalled 91 out of 260 individuals -- 35 per cent -- of those held on terrorism-related offences, according to the Home Office” positively (from a multiculturalist point of view). As we've seen, whites should represent around 81.9% of terror suspects. Yet they only make up only 35%. In other words, whites are massively under-represented when it comes to terror arrests. (Isn't this what left-wingers and liberals have been saying for years?)

Thus, when Metro (care-of the Home Office or the police) tells us that whites were “the only ethnic group to show a rise, up from 25 per cent in 2015”, how are we supposed to take it? Well, from the way this piece and the stats therein are constructed, this is meant to instil a fear of white terrorism in the readers. Yet, on analysis, it should do the opposite!

There's one political (i.e., not statistical) conclusion we can make from the line that whites were “the only ethnic group to show a rise”. And that's that the police and/or the Home Office have obediently responded to Muslim and Leftist claims that too many Muslims were being arrested for terrorism-related offences (i.e., relative to the arrests of white Brits). Thus, because the Home Office and/or police couldn't make up the figures, they instead attempted to hoodwink people by using the fraction “one-in-three” instead of percentages. Indeed, as I've said, the entire piece is designed specifically to give the impression that the arrests of Muslims (or “Asians”) has fallen in parallel to the rise of white people being arrested. (Hence the sentence: “The sharpest fall was for those of Asian ethnic appearance, down 24 to 125.”) Yet, again, an actual analysis of the data shows the opposite.

Finally, if this is designed to appease Muslims and leftists, then perhaps we should also bear in mind how the Home Office and/or police define the word “terrorism”. If the figures are being manipulated to assuage the feelings of Muslims and left-wingers, then perhaps the police and/or Home Office have also started to play games with the definition of the word “terrorism”. In other words, is leaving a pig's head outside a mosque (or even just pieces of bacon) now considered an act of terrorism? Is pulling the hijab off a Muslim woman (which has very rarely happened) classed as terrorism? If that's the case, then leaving a pig's head outside of a mosque is seen as being equivalent to planning to bomb a building full of civilians.

What follows is the British government's own definition of the word “terrorism”:

“Terrorism: interpretation.

(1) In this Act “terrorism” means the use or threat of action where...

(b) the use or threat is designed to influence the government [F1or an international governmental organisation] or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and

(c) the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious [F2, racial] or ideological cause.

(2) Action falls within this subsection if it --

(a) involves serious violence against a person,

(b) involves serious damage to property,

(c) endangers a person’s life, other than that of the person committing the action,

(d) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or

(e) is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system...” -- (Terrorism Act, 2000.)

What percentage of “white” terrorism falls under this definition? They don’t say, and we don’t know, which leaves us to draw our conclusions about whose agenda is being served.