Yet you are the one who is “spinning” the statement, here:
bolding mine
Your “Muslim populations as a whole” includes the populations of Palestine, Iran Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, India, northern Sudan and all the other countries where extremist views are either dominant or very prevalent. The whole point of this discussion is that those who have immigrated to Europe or North America, (or whose parents immigrated and they have, themselves, grown up in Europe or North America), differ from people of the same religion who live in the M.E.N.A. region, yet you choose to lump them together and make broad claims about what “Muslims” want.
And you continue:
bolding mine
Then:
Actually, they do not appear to be. Where is your support for your claim that the non-Muslims polled were only talking about collateral damage?
You are now back to lumping all Muslims together, regardless of where they live and then asserting your speculation as to the motives behind any given poll based on your own world view and not based on evidence.
The “77” was the footnote in Doug Saunders’s The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West?. It followed the statement regarding the Pew poll and then pointed to page 95 of Espositio’s book.
In the next paragraph Saunders goes on to say, citing The Gallup Coexist Index 2009: A Global Study of Interfaith Relations, pp 40-41:
These are numbers generated by asking the exact same question of various groups.
and
The “Muslim” numbers among Muslims living in Europe are very close to the numbers for their non-Muslim neighbors, which is the point of this thread.
Gallup asked Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and Atheists/Agnostics in America the same two questions: “Some people think that for the military to target and kill civilians is sometimes justified, while others think that kind of violence is never justified. Which is your opinion?” and “Some people think that for an individual person or a small group of persons to target and kill civilians is sometimes justified, while others think that kind of violence is never justified. Which is your opinion?”
For both questions, Muslims had both the highest percentage of respondents answering “Never”, and the lowest percentage of respondents answering “Sometimes” than any other group (even the atheists).
Eh? None of this has anything to do with me, I’m an atheist Hindu from India. And I do plenty to sort out the problems of that group. Devote my life to it in fact.
Well, apologies then - I tend to assume every speaker on this forum is a god-fearing Merkin from Merka, saves time :).
But the Christian-related questions still apply, even if you personally are no Christian. What separates Islam from Christianity, from your P.O.V ? I know for a fact there’s at least one very active Christian terrorist group in India (Nagaland, to be specific), so there you go. Wiki also tells me about a “National Liberation Front of Tripura” (wherever that is), and further religious-inspired violence in Odisha and Manipur. Is there “systematic effort to reform or combat” them throughout Christendom ?
And, again, what are moderate American or European Muslims supposed to do about e.g. Pakistani fanatics or what’s taught at Indonesian madrasas, exactly ?
But the question to be parsed out is blind targeting, and not in the name of formal political systems (such as a national military).
In that (UAE based?) Gallup poll, as I recall, the support for “sometimes justified” for the question as worded was about 24% in the general Protestant population. Ummm…sure…
I submit that 24% of the general US population does not hold support for the idea of blowing up a marketplace–i.e. blind targeting.
There is no parallel between the degree of support within the Islamic community–immigrant or national–and any other large-scale community (as defined by political boundary or large religious grouping) for what is loosely termed “extremism-type violence.”
Support for blindly-targeted violence in the name of a cause (such as a perception that it helps protect one’s religion) is substantially higher in every Muslim community than every other community. Within the Muslim community it varies substantially by political state, but in all cases it is much higher than within non-Muslim communities.
More than any other single factor (other than perhaps the subjugation of women and the desire to combine religious and state law) this is the reason so much of the general public in any western country retains a xenophobia against Muslims. While the number is a relatively small percent of all Muslims, support for blindly-targeted “terrorism” ad hoc organizations (i.e. non Military) is much much higher in Islamic groups than any other groupings (i.e. all atheists or all Hindus or all Christians or all US citizens, etc).
tomndebb has already asked you you justify your claim that more Muslims support “blindly targeted” violence against civilians as opposed to targeted systems.
Your “parsing” makes no sense, especially when the questions asked already separate out violence against civilians carried out in the name of formal political systems (such as a national military), and violence against civilians carried out by an individual person or small groups of persons.
What kind of tageting and killing of civilians by individual person or a small group of persons do you think the respondents to the survey were thinking of, if not the kind of “blind targeting” characteristic of terror attacks?
26%, actually (28% if you include the two percent who said "it depends’). And that’s support for targeting and killing civilians done by an individual person or small groups of persons. If the US military does it, support rises to 58%.
And if you have a robust critque of the survey’s methodology, by all means feel free to present it.
No it is not. The actual questions asked and answers provided are in the link ANT Pogo provided. You appear to be creating an artificial distinction that does not exist. The second question was
The responses from U.S. Muslims: 89% said “Never” and 11% said “Sometimes.” Among every other group in the U.S., Christians, Jews, or no belief, no other group reached even 80% for "“Never” and only Mormons, at 19% got below 20% for “Sometimes.” The Poll to which I linked from Europe asked whether it was OK to target civilians or employ violence with no reference to collateral damage. You are trying to parse a distinction without a difference.
Absolutely not accurate as demonstrated by the two polls just cited.
More accurately, this false impression, promoted by people who refuse to look at actual figures, is what stirs up the most fear of immigrant Muslims within Western nations. (At least you admit that it is xenophobia and not a rational response to this false perception.)
It’s like I said - what distinguishes Islam from other religions is that it has large and growing extremist strains. Every religion has its loonies. I don’t disagree with that. Do you disagree that Islam’s are more numerous(as a proportion and in absolute numbers) and more dangerous?
I would certainly agree that, world wide, the numbers of Fundamentalist and radicalized Muslims is greater than threatening groups in other religions at this time.
However, the point of this thread was that those numbers (that generally occur in the M.E.N.A. region and other Asian locales) were indicative of a threat to Europe by Muslim immigrants. The evidence so far presented has indicated the opposite: that immigrant Muslims to Europe and North America are overwhelmingly good citizens with attitudes similar to the attitudes of the non-Muslims who already live in those lands. This is not to say that there are no individual Muslims who are threats in Europe and North America. However, there is no basis for the idea put forth by the OP that any actions should be undertaken in support of the OP’s xenophobia. In fact, when Rep. Peter King (R-NY) decided to hold grandstanding hearings on the threat that Muslims pose by sheltering the radicals in their midst, his claims were shot down by members of the Homeland Security Agency and various police departments who pointed out that most “radicals” have been identified to police agencies by their Muslim neighbors and that several major terrorist plots had been foiled by information provided by Muslim groups.
Similar to every other despised immigrant group that has suffered slanderous claims of disloyalty, refusal to assimilate, and related accusations, the evidence indicates that Muslim immigrants are assimilating at about the same rates as previous groups and pose no threat to their host nations.
Yeah ok, I haven’t examined the evidence for assimilation of Muslim groups in Western countries too closely. I’m willing to believe that they’re not significantly different from others, although this survey
of British Muslims gives me pause. Specifically the fact that the younger Muslims are the ones that are giving the more ‘retrograde’ responses - more willing to withdraw girls from school if the Hijab were disallowed, higher preference for living under sharia law, want people to be punished for ‘insulting’ Islam etc. Maybe Britain is a special case, I know there have been cases of some preachers there that have been connected with radicalisation.
I jumped into this thread because the Pew group finding that 13% of Muslims sometimes approve of bombing civilians in defence of Islam strikes me as high, and because it is approving of violence in defence of an optional ideology, it is less justifiable to me than in pursuit of other aims like national defence or something along those lines. The Gallup poll that you’ve used to try and make that point may or may not be comparable, simply because it is a separate poll. Their sampling methodology, question and frame could be wildly different.
I still agree that 13% approving of suicide strikes in defence of Islam is not necessarily something to fret about, and I would definitely not agree with any discrimination against extant immigrant groups. But I may agree with immigration policy that has the end effect, though probably not the stated goal, of reducing/monitoring immigration rates from Muslim countries to ensure greater assimilation and movement away from the aspects of Islam that are unpleasant.
Worldwide ? Sure. In India ? Maybe, I dunno - though I suppose it’d be difficult to separate religious nuts from nationalist/regionalist nuts. In Europe and the US ? No, absolutely not.
In fact I believe it is, based on previous polls made in various European countries and showing that British muslims are much more poorly integrated than muslims in other European countries like France or Germany (for instance they self-identify much less as British than French muslims self-identify as French)
This might be related to different policies (like the prevalence of communautarism in the UK, viewed as a very bad thing in France), but my suspicion is that it’s related at least in part to the origin of most muslim immigrants. Pakistan isn’t the same at all as Algeria (France), Turkey (Germany) or Morroco (Spain). There are youth “reverting” to a form of strict Islam that was unknown to their immigrant parents (hence the problem with extremist preachers) but I would assume that most are unlikely to begin supporting a brand of Islam or muslim “traditions”, or adopt views about the relative importance of religion vs law that would be foreign even to those of their relatives still living in their country of origin.
Eh. It’s quite simple to separate them in the case of Islam and Hinduism. The Christian group that you pointed to earlier, yes probably regionalist. Also previous Sikh separationist groups in the 80’s could be looked at as regionalist.
I think Islamic fundamentalism in India is particularly dangerous in that it has had the unfortunate effect of increasing Hindu fundamentalism as a response. Right from the Muslim league in pre independence India and partition, to modern India in cases like Shah Bano(a 62-year-old Muslim, divorced by her husband in 1978 but even after winning the case at the Supreme court of India was subsequently denied alimony because the Indian Parliament reversed the judgement under pressure of Islamic orthodoxy Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum - Wikipedia) and banning of the Satanic verses, the evident success of Muslim groups in getting their way in India has inspired an attempt to introduce similarly aggressive and intolerant elements to Hinduism, which is a pity, because Hinduism is otherwise quite divergent from Islam.