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Islamophobic or Informed?
By Robert SpencerA new Newsweek Poll on American attitudes toward Muslims and Islam has found that 46 percent of Americans believe that the United States is taking in too many Muslim immigrants. 32 percent think that Muslims in America are less loyal to the United States than they are to Islam. 28 percent believe that the Quran condones violence, and 41 percent hold that Islamic culture glorifies suicide. 54 percent are either somewhat worried or very worried about Islamic jihadists in this country, and 52 percent support FBI surveillance of mosques, with the same percentage rejecting the claim of American Muslim advocacy groups that Muslims are being singled out by investigators and police. What are we to make of these figures? Do they mean that American Muslim advocacy groups have to do more to combat Islamophobia? That is the likely response: watch now for the follow-up stories about Islamophobia, in which the onus for all the attitudes displayed in this poll is placed firmly and solely upon non-Muslim Americans, as if Muslims were an entirely innocent, passive group that was doing nothing whatsoever to make anyone suspicious or angry at all. Newsweek itself led this off by asserting in another article published along with the poll that Muslims in America are vulnerable as never before. That story began with an account of a Muslim in Cleveland asking George W. Bush: What are we doing with public diplomacy to change the hearts and minds of a billion and a half Muslims around the world? The unspoken assumption behind this question is that Muslim fury at the West stems entirely from the actions of the United States and other Western countries, and not from anything within the Islamic world itself. Daud Abdullah, the Deputy Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), expressed another aspect of this view after the recent jihad plots were discovered in London and Glasgow, when he suggested that the religion of the attackers was incidental to their plots: Lets not create a hypothetical problem it can be the work of Muslims, Christians, Jews or Buddhists. The prevailing view is that the Islamic Faith of todays terrorists has nothing to do with their actions, and those who suspected otherwise are simply bigots who are drawing an unwarranted connection between Islam and terrorism. But it is some Muslims who are themselves making that connection, as the recent Pew Research Center poll of Muslims in America revealed: twenty-six percent of Muslims between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine affirmed that there could be justification in some (unspecified) circumstances for suicide bombing, and five percent of all the Muslims surveyed said that they had a favorable view of Al-Qaeda. Given the Pew Centers estimate of 2.35 million Muslims in America, and the total of thirteen percent that avowed a belief that suicide bombings could ever be justified, thats over 300,000 supporters of suicide attacks. And 117,500 supporters of Al-Qaeda. Rest at link Posted by: ed 2007-07-24 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=194380 |