Raymond Ibrahim is the author of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West.

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Let’s do a bit of science.

Maybe, like me, you have had various social

media invaded by people making all sorts of complaints about something called

5G. That’s the newest mobile data standard. Unless you are really special, that

doesn’t work on your phone yet, but the networks are being installed, and newer

handsets using them will be available soon, probably starting at the top end of

the price range.

5G just means the fifth generation, the

first was basic cellphones, the second was text messaging, 4G allows internet,

and 5G will allow you to control the space shuttle, or something. If you click

too far into Facebook or YouTube, you’d be forgiven for thinking that an apocalypse

was planned, something between the worst nightmares of the antivaxxers and

those people who say that their thoughts are controlled by the CIA via a chip

in their brain. So I really just want to give the basic scientific information

here.

5G is data transmitted over radio waves.

Just like any other form of data transmitted through the air, cellphone voice

or data signals, FM radio, broadcast TV or your home wifi. All of them are,

technically, radiation. So is light – by which I mean the light that your eyes

use to see things around you, and so are magnetic waves, the ones that spin the

needle on a compass.

Some conspiracy theorists have been saying

vague things that imply that 5G uses some weird special type of radiation that

is dangerous or untested. In reality, 5G uses frequencies that are already in

use by home wifi systems and digital TV broadcasts. Sure, the content of that

signal is new technology, but the content of the signal has no relevance to the

frequency it’s broadcast on.

So where does that all collide with radiation that we know can kill us? Basically, the electromagnetic spectrum is split in two halves – ionizing radiation and non-ionizing radiation. Non-ionizing radiation is basically too weak t...