In what will come as a major shock to Jihad Watch readers, a new study by, of all people, the US Institute for Peace shows that Muslims who believe Islam should play a role in politics (as traditionally it has) support acts of violence committed in its name to a greater degree than those who do not.
Of course, to anyone who actually has any familiarity with the teachings and history of Islam will find this no surprise.
“New Study: Political Islam Correlated to Support for Terrorism,” by Patrick Poole in The American Thinker:
A new study by the US Institute for Peace (USIP) of polling data from fourteen different Muslim countries finds that support for a role for Islam in politics strongly correlates with more likely support for terrorism. This statistical analysis is certain to draw protests from the usual propagandists of radical Islam in the US, even though the USIP can hardly be considered a neo-conservative institution.
[…]
The support for terrorism is also dispersed in the Muslim world: of the top five countries in the fourteen surveyed, two were in the Middle East (Lebanon and Jordan), two were in Africa (Nigeria, Ivory Coast) and one was in Asia (Bangladesh). It should be noted that Egypt refused to let the question be asked as part of the survey, and other presumably high terrorism support areas, including Syria, Iran, Iraq, the Palestinian Authority and Saudi Arabia, were not included in the poll.
The standout finding of the USIP study is that support for an increased role for Islam in politics is correlated with greater support for the use of terrorism, even in countries that already adhere to political Islam:
People who support a strong role for Islam in politics are more likely to also support terrorism. Perhaps more surprisingly, people who perceive Islam to play a large role in the politics of their home country are also more likely to support terrorism. (p. 7)
The USIP study also busts the bubble of radical Islamic apologists who claim that support for terrorism is driven by people living under Islamic dictatorships. What the data shows is that dissatisfaction with Islam’s role in internal politics has very little correlation to attitudes on terror. The study finds that
…dissatisfaction with the role of Islam in one’s own country’s politics is much more weakly correlated with support for terrorism then raw attitudes toward to role of Islam. (p. 7)
Read it all.