How many radical Muslims are there in the world?

Writing at the Weekly Standard, Robert Satloff takes apart a new book by John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, both of them professional pro-Islam propagandists, published by the Gallup organization, where Mogehed is executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. Satloff shows how, through fraudulent definition of the word “radical,” the authors make it appear that a multi-year study of Muslim opinion worldwide showed that only seven percent of Muslims are radical, when, in reality, by any fair reading of the authors’ own polling data, the correct number is 37 percent.

The authors define Muslim radicals as those who say the 9/11 attack was “completely justified,” which was seven percent of the sample. However, there were two other categories of respondents who said that the attack was at least partially justified, and they are labeled by the authors as “moderates.” The first of those groups comprises 6.5 percent of the sample, the second comprises 23.1 percent. Further, the respondents in that last category, making up 23.1 percent, also said that they hate America, want to impose Sharia law, support suicide bombing, and oppose equal rights for women. Yet Esposito and Mogahed call them “moderates.”

7 plus 6.5 plus 23.1 equals 36.6 percent of 1.2 billion Muslims, or 439 million radical Muslims in the world. Just a tiny unrepresentative minority.

The theme of the Esposito-Mogahed book is that most Muslims are just like us, a notion mocked by the title of Satloff’s article: “Just Like Us! Really?” This is most ironic, given that the Weekly Standard is a leading supporter of President Bush and his Islam democratization policy, which is founded on the assumption that Muslims are … just like us. The Standard thus happily takes apart leftists who say that Muslims are just like us, while it remains silent about and keeps supporting the president who says that Muslims are just like us.

Clearly, the right-liberal hand doesn’t know what the left-liberal hand is doing, or, more precisely, the right-liberal hand refuses to recognize that it is doing the same thing as the left-liberal hand, even as it condemns the left-liberal hand.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 09, 2008 02:12 PM | Send