By Robert Spencer Jihad Watch: “Islamophobic” or Informed?
Sphere: Related ContentSome reflections on some recent polls, in FrontPage today (news links in the original):
A 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 Qur’an 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: “Let’s not create a hypothetical problem…it can be the work of Muslims, Christians, Jews or Buddhists.”
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