ANOTHER MUSLIM ADDRESSES THE NEW PEW SURVEY: At the Huffington Post, Ali Eteraz addresses one issue in the survey--and will be addressing others:

The focus must be on the problems discovered. 13% of US Muslims of all ages feel that there are scenarios in which suicide bombings are justified. Only 40% of all US Muslims believe that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks. US Muslims, in comparison with all Americans, favor governmental intrusion in morality almost 2 to 1. Numbers show that the Blackamerican Muslim population does not share the financial success or the social optimism of immigrant Muslims. Homosexuals are reviled. A large number of youth, almost three times as many as in Pakistan, believe that there is an inherent conflict between faith and modern life.

Over my next couple of posts I will be evaluating just a few of the troubling and startling discoveries in the survey, starting with the one that has been bothering me the most: 25% of US Muslims under 30 support suicide bombings in some capacity.

This one has plenty of apologists. They argue that the operative question -- "Can Suicide Bombings of Civilian Targets to Defend Islam Be Justified?" -- was phrased badly, because it is perfectly natural for a religious person to want to "defend" his or her faith.

This is bunk.

Read the whole thing.
[Hat tip: Instapundit]

So who is Ali Eteraz? According to his bio:

Ali Eteraz, 26, is an international finance and human rights lawyer. During law school he worked on litigation against US defense contractors involved in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, and since represented plaintiffs defrauded by Wall Street. He is the founder of Eteraz.Org: States of Islam, a think tank and interactive web portal dedicated to cataloging and taking action on legal and legislative reform in the Muslim world (soon to be available in Urdu, Farsi and Arabic). His essays have been published in Counterpunch, Killing the Buddha, The Revealer, and Identity Theory. His personal blog, Unwilling Self-Negation, was a 2006 finalist for an International Best Of Blogs Award. He is currently working on a book about children and Islamic militancy tentatively entitled Prophets in Dust.

Technorati Tag: Pew Survey and Moderate Muslims.

A MODERATE MUSLIM ON THE NEW PEW SURVEY: Tawfik Hamid, former member of a terrorist group and now a Muslim reformer, has been accused by CAIR of being "the latest weapon in the Islamophobe arsenal."

High praise that makes his op-ed in The Wall Street Journal--How to End 'Islamophobia'--well worth reading.

According to a recent Pew Global Attitudes survey, "younger Muslims in the U.S. are much more likely than older Muslim Americans to say that suicide bombing in the defense of Islam can be at least sometimes justified." About one out of every four American Muslims under 30 think suicide bombing in defense of Islam is justified in at least some circumstances. Twenty-eight percent believe that Muslims did not carry out the 9/11 attacks and 32% declined to answer that question.

While the survey has been represented in the media as proof of moderation among American Muslims, the actual results should yield the opposite conclusion. If, as the Pew study estimates, there are 2.35 million Muslims in America, that means there are a substantial number of people in the U.S. who think suicide bombing is sometimes justified. Similarly, if 5% of American Muslims support al Qaeda, that's more than 100,000 people.

Read Hamid on what needs to be done.

Technorati Tag: PEW Survey and Islamophobia and Islamists and Tawfik Hamid and Islam.

MUSLIMS IN AMERICA ON JEWS AND ISRAEL: On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web had an item about the PEW Research Center study sample study of Muslims in America:

One very encouraging sign is that American Muslims do not seem to be far from the U.S. mainstream when it comes to their views of Jews and Israel. Much has been made of the finding that 28% of Muslims surveyed don't believe Arabs were responsible for 9/11. But only 1% said they believed "Israel/Jews" were responsible. (Seven percent said "U.S. government conspiracy/President Bush," which we're guessing is par for the course for a group that went more than 70% for Kerry.)

More substantively, 61% of Muslims answered in the affirmative the question: "Can a way be found for Israel and Palestinian rights to coexist?" Only 16% said no. These totals are similar to those of the general public in the U.S. (67% to 15%) and Israel (67% to 29%). Arab-American Muslims were more anti-Israel than others, but even they answered "yes" by 49% to 32%.

By contrast, in 2003 Pew asked people in predominately Muslim countries if they agreed that "the rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of as long as the state of Israel exists." Anywhere from a 49% plurality (in Turkey) to a 90% majority (in Morocco) said they did.

On the other hand:

one in four young adult Muslims supports the idea of suicide bombing to "defend Islam" and only four in ten think Arabs had anything to do with the 9/11 suicide bombing.

Mmmm, this poll seems to have something for everyone.

The poll also seems to have finally settled the question of how many Muslims there are in the US--and apparently CAIR was a little off the mark: by about 5 million Muslims. Iain Murray writes:

Five years ago, when we were at STATS, Howard Fienberg and I wrote a piece for the Christian Science Monitor that asked how many Muslims there were in America. We reviewed the evidence and came to the conclusion that there were about 2 million. For this, CAIR called us anti-Semitic, as it claimed there were 7-8 million.

Now, a new, exhaustive study from the Pew Research Center has asked the same question, and concludes there are about 2.35 million Muslims in America.

I'm not sure how CAIR came to the conclusion that Murray was being Anti-Semitic. Then again, I don't know how they so exaggerated how many Muslims there are in the US.

UPDATE: Iain Murray makes a correction--it wasn't CAIR

UPDATE: The poll apparently included members of the Nation of Islam, which could have skewed the results.

Technorati Tag: PEW and CAIR and Muslims and US.