WHAT THE PEW STUDY SAYS ABOUT CAIR ITSELF: At The American Thinker, Patrick Poole writes about who CAIR actually represents:

The Pew Study refutes two of the most regular claims offered by CAIR. The first is the 8 million Muslim myth - the attempt by CAIR and other Islamist organizations to inflate the Muslim population to claim greater political clout. But Pew estimates only 2.35 million Muslims - less than one percent of the total population. This is in line with most other official studies conducted over the past decade by Pew, the University of Chicago, Columbia University and others.

The second myth propounded by CAIR destroyed by this study is that Muslims in America are everywhere oppressed and alienated by non-Muslims. Al-Akhras himself claims that American Muslims are well-integrated into society, and the Pew poll finds that Muslim-American personal income and education are comparable to the public at-large. This is hardly the portrait of a victimized community, and is evidence that the fear-mongering which is the staple of CAIR's public statements has no basis in fact. The support by Ahmad Al-Ahkras for the Pew study findings contradicts some of the very claims he has made about the downtrodden Muslim community in the past.

As I've recently written about elsewhere, CAIR is increasingly non-representative of most American Muslims ("CAIR by the Numbers"). Based on the most recent IRS Form 990 that CAIR has made publicly available, I estimated that actual CAIR membership in 2005 was approximately 2,615, which was down by almost half from the year before (4,761 members in 2004). Thus, CAIR actually represents only one out of every 100 Muslims in America. What the Pew study tells us, when combined with CAIR's own data, is that CAIR's radical agenda is being rejected by the vast majority of American Muslims.

This is why we see CAIR officials such as Ahmad Al-Akhras so desperate to get in front of the media claiming to represent the entire community. It is fair to question the amount of attention given this small radical fringe by the mainstream media. Less media attention to CAIR spokesmen would be a positive step to improve the image of American Muslims.

Technorati Tag: CAIR and PEW.