Patrick Poole uncovers more problems with the AP story by Eric Gorski that I discussed here.
Gorski says:
A December 2006 survey by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Attitudes found 24 percent of Americans believe “bombings and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians” are often or sometimes justified. The poll found no significant variance based on age.
His statement on this poll is only two sentences long, but there are several misrepresentations here in addition to one outright lie.
The first problem is that they December 2006 wasn’t done by the “University of Maryland’s Program on International Attitudes”, but the Program on International Policy Attitudes (does the AP have any factcheckers?), which is not part of the U of Maryland at all, but is a joint project between the Center on Policy Attitudes (COPA) and the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), University of Maryland. It is an independently-funded organization with loose ties to UofM, but both Al-Akhras and Gorski have stretched PIPA’s relationship with the university to try to give it more clout. The poll was not conducted by the university, however, as they claim.
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But the absolutely categorical lie Gorski engages in is when he says, “The poll found no significant variance based on age.” But when you look at the PIPA study, the responses are not broken down by age – Gorski conjures this fact completely out of thin air! In fact, the American respondents aren’t even broken down by age anywhere in the study or the questionnaire. He has to manufacture it himself.
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Like a dog returning to its vomit, there is a reason why the Islamists and their media establishment apologists keep returning to this PIPA study: they have been successful thus far at twisting and manipulating the poll results to try to divert attention from the shocking findings of the Pew study. And as I stated in my previous article, they have to engage in an equivalence between conventional and internationally recognized warfare (the subject of the PIPA poll) with terrorism (the Pew study asked specifically about suicide bombings) to even try to bring the PIPA study into play. This equivalence between conventional warfare and terrorism is precisely the same that Islamists constantly tell us that they don’t make (equating the bombing of factories in Germany during WWII and the HAMAS suicide bombing of Israeli pizza parlors filled with Jewish teenagers).
But not even the Islamists are reading from the same script when it comes to this PIPA study. While Ahmad Al-Akhras of CAIR cites “24 percent of Americans, reported in the Maryland study, who believe these attacks are “often or sometimes justified”, Ingrid Mattson, President of the Islamic Society of North America, cites this exact same PIPA study and says:
“And what am I to make of the fact that according to the University of Maryland, 51% of Americans believe that “bombings and other types of attacks against civilians are sometimes justified?”
Citing the exact same poll, CAIR and ISNA come up with two entirely different results for this same question – 24 percent and 51 percent! Can’t these clowns get it right? You would think the Islamists would at least collaborate a little more closely so they can tell the same lies….