#1 Excerpt, Page 144, Inside The Revolution, Joe C. Rosenberg.
In 2007, the Pew Research Center published the largest and most comprehensive study of Muslim American opinion ever done, involving nearly sixy thousand interviews with Muslim Americans conducted in English, Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu. The study, entitled "Muslims in America; Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream." found that there are an estimed 2.35 million Muslims in the U.S. and that they are "largley assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world." The stuy also found that "Muslims in the United States reject Islamic extremism by larger margins that do Muslim minorities in Western European countries." For Example, nearly seven in ten Muslims in America (68 percent) had a "somewhat unfavorable" or "very unfavorable" view of al Qaeda.
This is good news, to be sure. But in the current environment, it must be asked: why was it not 100 percent? Deeply troubling, in fact, was that fully 5 percent of all Muslims in America admitted to the pollsters that they had a favorable view of al Qaeda. This included 7 percent of American converts to Islam and 9 percent of Afrian-American Muslims. Moreover, nearly three in ten (27 percent) said the either didn't know or refused to answer questions about their view of al Qaida. Out of 2,350,000 Muslims, this means that there are at least 117,500 Muslims inside the U.S. who like what Osama bin Laden and his colleagues are doing and have a favorable view of their terrorist networks. If those who refused to answer the question were disguising their own support for al Qaeda, there could b another 600,000 or more Radical Muslims or Radical-leaning Muslims or sympathizers inside the country. |