In FrontPage this morning, Daniel Pipes discusses the recent British opinion polls that indicate substantial support among Muslims for the bombings, and comments:
(1) It is hard to say which is the most alarming of these many worrisome statistics, but two stand out. That less than three-quarters of Muslims in Britain indicate they would tell the police about an impending terrorist attack raises grave doubts about the Blair government’s tactic of getting Muslims to police their own community. That one-third of Muslims do not accept British society and want to end it, presumably to pave the way for an Islamic order, casts comparable doubts on Britain’s much-vaunted multicultural ideal.
(2) Even the Telegraph’s interpreter of its survey, Professor Anthony King of Essex University, feels compelled to sugar the results, calling them “at once reassuring and disturbing, in some ways even alarming,” whatever that means. In several specific instances, he turns hair-raising statistics into cheerful ones (that 73 percent would warn of an impending terrorist attack he deems “impressive”). The newspaper’s and the professor’s panglossian attitude makes one wonder what might wake the British to the Islamist hell growing in their midst.
That panglossian attitude is unfortunately not restricted simply to the Telegraph and this professor.
Read it all.