Pew poll shows declining support for extremism among Muslims

A Pew Global poll shows that support for suicide bombing and for Muslim extremism is dropping in some Muslim countries. This will undoubtedly be used as proof that the “true” Islam, the “moderate” Islam, the “peaceful” and “tolerant” Islam, is gaining sway in the Muslim world. For example, the poll finds that 73 percent of the Moroccan public believe that Islamic extremism poses a national threat, 52 percent in Pakistan, 47 percent in Turkey, and 10 percent in Jordan. The reader who sent me the poll asked me, doesn’t the 73 percent figure for Morocco show that not all Muslims are radicals?

First of all, the numbers for other countries are much lower. But even if there were such high numbers in many countries, what would that signify? The Islamic extremists, such as the Islamic Brotherhood and the Taliban, are horrible people. Most normal people would not want to come under their power. But that doesn’t mean that they will do anything to oppose what they’re doing, whether in their own countries or, more importantly, in non-Muslim countries.

That some Muslims are more extreme and violent than others is nothing new. The point is that “ordinary” Muslims cannot really separate themselves from the extremists. Islam is a single community of believers in which there is a spectrum. There are the extremists, then the people who identify with the extremists but don’t actively participate, then people who just follow along, and then people who are indifferent, then people who do not like the extremism but are afraid to do anything about it, then a tiny number who actively oppose the extremists. The latter group often ends up dead.

The net result is a community with a strong extremist element which the others cannot stop or completely dissociate themselves from, partly out of fear, but also out of the fact that the extremists are good Muslims and so cannot be excluded from the Islamic community, the umma. It’s this unbreakable bond among Muslims, uniting “moderates” to terrorists in a single mutually supporting community of faith, that led radio host Michael Graham to call Islam a “terrorist organization.”

So we need to look not at a couple of poll numbers but at the total phenomenon of Islam. If the extremists are a part of Islam, then wherever Islam is, those extremists will be. This relates most especially to the effect of Muslim immigrant populations on Western societies.

We also need to remember that what people say in opinion polls is very different from what they do in real life. Huge majorities of Americans say they want a drastic reduction in legal immigration. But they don’t do anything about it, do they?

A further example of how misleading polls can be is seen in this excerpt from the Pew Report showing declines in support for suicide bombing.

The polling also finds that in most majority-Muslim countries surveyed, support for suicide bombings and other acts of violence in defense of Islam has declined significantly. In Turkey, Morocco and Indonesia, 15% or fewer now say such actions are justifiable. In Pakistan, only one-in-four now take that view (25%), a sharp drop from 41% in March 2004. In Lebanon, 39% now regard acts of terrorism as often or sometimes justified, again a sharp drop from the 73% who shared that view in 2002. A notable exception to this trend is Jordan, where a majority (57%) now says suicide bombings and other violent actions are justifiable in defense of Islam.

When it comes to suicide bombings in Iraq, however, Muslims in the surveyed countries are divided. Nearly half of Muslims in Lebanon and Jordan, and 56% in Morocco, say suicide bombings against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq are justifiable. However, substantial majorities in Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia take the opposite view.

Support for suicide bombing has dropped, and, once again, some people will make a huge deal out of that, saying it proves Muslims aren’t all terror supporters. But, once again, no one has ever said that all Muslims are terror supporters. The point rather is that the Islamic community as a whole has terror as an intrinsic part of it, and that many or most or all of the “non-terrorists” are basically unwilling or unable to do anything about that. The poll results themselves indicate how bad the situation is: the numbers supporting suicide bombings have dropped in some countries, but are still high. The bottom line is that a large part of the Muslim population vocally supports this monstrously, inconceivably evil practice. If “only” 15 percent, or “only” 25 percent, or “only” 39 percent, or “only” 57 percent of Christians supported the routine mass slaughter of innocent non-Christians, while the most of the rest of the Christian community passively went along with it, would we not conclude that Christianity—not “extremist” Christianity—represented a deadly threat to the non-Christian world?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 30, 2005 02:16 PM | Send