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.