The Pew Research Center has published what they call a “Portrait of Muslim Americans.” That title is backward—it should be American Muslims, since Muslim is not an ethnicity—and so is the rest of the report. Check out the feel-good boldface and italics: “Ten years after 9/11, U.S. Muslims continue to reject extremism by large margins. Still, 21% of Muslim Americans say there is at least a fair amount of support for extremism among U.S. Muslims.”
So even though 1/5 of Muslims in the United States perceive support for “extremism” among their own people, we’re supposed to be reassured that the remainder don’t. “One out of five of us want to kill you!” And that’s good news, because the rest do not! That’s a remarkable spin, Pew. (More than that: 21 percent report being singled out by airport security and only 13 percent report being singled out by law enforcement officers—even though one fifth of American Muslims perceive their own community as wishing harm on the United States.)
Worse: in addition to the sixty percent that said the U.S. should be “very concerned about the possible rise of Islamic extremism in the U.S.,” five percent report that they have a favorable view of al Qaeda. Another 11 percent said they had only a somewhat unfavorable view of al Qaeda, and 14 percent answered “don’t know,” on a subject about which every reasoning being does have an opinion. Sure, that’s low relative to other countries, like Indonesia, where one out of five Muslims view al Qaeda favorably. But one can hardly imagine the media’s tone of outrage if five percent of white Americans viewed the KKK favorably and another 14 percent “didn’t know”—let alone if twenty percent reported strong support for the KKK among their peers! Yet the Pew Research Center reports this in reassuring terms, as if there’s no reason for concern, and the Muslim community is victimized by unfair prejudice.
There are 1.8 million Muslims in the United States. Ninety thousand of them are willing to state that they have a favorable view of al Qaeda, and 252,000 are not willing to answer that question at all. But only racist bigot Islamophobes would express concern over such numbers, because, after all, the rest wish us well.
(Via A&G, who have been talking about this all week.)
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