Although Leow Mei Chern has chosen to take her complaint about me further to the Sun newspaper, I will reply here solely in malaysiakini.

To begin, I address her declaration that one cannot gain much from Google. Leow (or Lew as her surname appears in the mainstream) writes : 'Out of curiosity, I googled up the phrases "female terrorists" (14,300 Google hits) and "male terrorists" (2,260 Google hits).' From these anomalous figures, she ventures to conclude with some authority: 'It doesn't take long for one to see the absurdity of using these sorts of numbers to assert a point of view.'

I contend instead that the absurd proportion or percentages she obtained arose from Leow's own limitation in framing her Google query. Terrorists are understood to be men. Hence their gender needs to be specified only if they happen not to be men.

To illustrate a similarly unproductive line of enquiry: google 'male nurse'. You get 438,000 hits. 'Female nurse' earns 110,000 hits. Why the skewed numbers at odds with the reality we know? Simply because nurses are understood to be women and therefore 'nurse' implies a female nurse without requiring any qualifier - just as 'terrorist' implies a male terrorist.

Now try googling 'nurse' and you have 125,000,000, or 125 million hits. It doesn't take long for one to see how the answers you get are only as smart as the questions you ask.

The framing of questions also follows an implicit convention. For instance, you'd say: 'How wide is the road?' Answer: 10 metres. 'How long is it?' 50 km. A reply that sounds like: 'The road is 10 metres narrow and 50 km short' goes against the grain. Getting a weird answer only indicates that you don't know how to ask your question to start with.

Still on the topic of Google, Leow claims the number of hits registered by a search term ' at most reflect the number of people talking about Muslim terrorists, and not even terrorist websites themselves. After all, those she [Ang] would term as terrorists would not call themselves terrorists on their own websites.'

I thank Leow for pointing me in the right direction. True enough, those nice folks would presumably call themselves martyr or 'syahid'. Terrorist organisations do have websites. To read the vision and mission statements they post, you can utilise one of the several online (free) translation services. And while surfing, catch a snuff video or two.

Talking still about the Net, can we glean any useful information from its buzz on terrorism? As I explained at the beginning of this letter, it's a matter of doing intelligent research on the Net and sourcing from credible and reliable info banks. My earlier observation - which Leow took great exception to - that 'extremist and militant factions in Islam have been fingered or implicated in urban terrorism worldwide targeting non-Muslims in general ' will be validated, not negated, by your online findings.

Leow, on the other hand, holds the association of terrorism with Muslim perpetrators to be my 'prejudiced worldview'. If she or any other reader cares to highlight a more convincing correlation between adherents of other religions and acts of terrorism against civilians globally, I am certainly willing to reconsider this matter.

The second bone of contention between me and Leow lies in the interpretation of the now oft-quoted Merdeka Centre survey.

That 11.6% of Malaysian Muslims see suicide bombers as martyrs while 24.8% refuse to commit to an opinion is to me alarming. Leow however prefers a positive take on the remaining '62%-88% that does not subscribe to this view'.

She writes: 'In response to other questions in the same survey, 79.5% responded that Muslim Malaysians should learn about other religions in Malaysia, 83.8% responded that Muslims could participate in interfaith dialogue, and 76% responded that if there was an interfaith council in Malaysia, Islam should be part of that council.'

Leow selects this set of statistics to suggest that the majority of Muslims in Malaysia are open to discussion, and imply the obverse - 'fundamentalists' are in the minority.

However, significant figures that Leow omits to mention from the same survey show a contrasting trend - there is undeniably a growing orthodoxy in beliefs:

• 77.3% want stricter syariah laws in Malaysia.

Close to 98% of Malaysian Muslims believe their co-religionists cannot be permitted to leave the faith. Slamming the door shut in this way augurs ill for beleaguered Malaysians like Lina Joy. Any others contemplating to seek solace and purpose in other religions, or simply the freedom to not believe, can expect to be turned into little more than political footballs too.