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Fitzgerald: The new survey of Muslim attitudes means nothing

Jul 28, 2007 2:48 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald

More Muslims reject extremism, survey finds: Support for bombings fell in seven of eight Muslim countries surveyed — the headline to this story

This survey means nothing, except insofar as it has the ability to mislead and console the unwary. Why? Suicide bombings are now taking place not against the Americans — who mostly suffer casualties from I.E.D.’s, but against other Muslims, in both Iraq and Pakistan, where they are directed against the government. And there have been other cases in Lebanon and in Saudi Arabia. And it may have spread to the Maghreb. Muslims are well aware of this. They are well aware that suicide bombings may be a threat to them, to their own wellbeing, as they walk down the streets of Cairo or Damascus or Beirut or Algiers or Riyadh.

And they are also well aware of what damage, not all terrorism, but a particular kind of terrorism — suicide bombing — does to the all-important “image” of Islam. It is too easy to put into a political cartoon a suicide-belted fanatic. That can be easily grasped by the viewer. A growing number of Muslims obviously feel keenly the public-relations problem, which for them is quite different from moral abhorrence.
Imagine, if you will, that there were no suicide bombs going off in Iraq, or now in Pakistan, or in Algiers, or, here and there, even in Lebanon, or Morocco. Imagine that you are a Muslim living in Doha or Dearborn. If in Doha, you probably don’t like the idea that suicide-bombers could suddenly decide that the Al-Thani family has been too friendly to Infidels (it’s nonsense), or that the wife of the reigning ruler is a bit too fashionably got up and too “feminist” in her leanings. And these suicide-bombings, you might feel at this point, are something to be discouraged, for they might come to you.

And if you are a Muslim in Dearborn, and are keenly aware of the need to lie low for now, and to proceed softly-softly so as to ensure that you have the time to solidly insinuate yourself into the American landscape. You do this not least through constant repetition of phrases about “three abrahamic faiths” and a deliberate emphasis, with which the media plays eager ball, on how family-oriented (you bet!) Muslims are, and what good incomes Muslims make in this country (a sign which we are apparently to interpret as making them more American, Just Like Us, Nearer My God to Thee) and all kinds of other things. None of them, of course, have anything to do with the texts or tenets or inculcated beliefs of Islam, such as sole loyalty being owed only to Islam and fellow members of the Umma. None mention the disbelief in pluralism (save where, in countries still controlled by Infidels, such “pluralism” can be exploited to Muslim advantage), or in individual rights and autonomy (Islam is a collectivist faith; the individual does not matter, and he certainly is not to be permitted the Western ideas of freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of speech).

That’s it. Some of those answering the survey of Muslim “opinion” surely have learned by now that they can answer any damn way that suits the interests of Islam, and would naturally wish to put the best face on Islam for the Infidels that they can. So the lying, which we shall primly describe as the “margin for error,” only goes one way — and the size of that “margin” in a culture of lying for Islam must be very large. Certainly it cannot possibly be estimated in any plausible way.

All such polls of Muslims, when they have at hand a worked-out doctrine of religiously-sanctioned dissiumulation (taqiyya and kitman, both of which are ultimately derived from Muhammad’s declaration that “war is deception” — a statement taken to heart over the past 1350 years of Islamic history) are silly. Or rather, they are useful only in establishing the absolutely minimum number of Muslims who might support something hideous. If 29% of Muslims living in Great Britain, for example, reply to a poll that they support acts of terrorism within Britain itself, then one has a base line — 29% — and can conclude, with confidence, that at least 29% of Muslims in Great Britain would support domestic terrorism. But that is all one can say. One cannot say, with equal confidence, that 71% of Muslims living in Great Britain are unalterably opposed, or even opposed, to acts of terrorism within Great Britain. One cannot say that those who are opposed to such acts of terrorism within Great Britain are also opposed to such acts in, say, New York or Washington, D.C., or for that matter Jerusalem or Delhi or Bombay.

And the main point is this: is any declared opposition to a particular kind of terrorism — as suicide bombing — based on fear that this weapon could easily be used, as in Iraq and Pakistan, against Muslim regimes, and so be a threat, given the nature of the weapon, to the security of Muslim streets in Muslim cities, combined with a worry over Islam’s “image”? Or is it a principled opposition to the random killing of non-combatants? And does it extend to Infidels, and if so, to all Infidels, or only those who live in cities where there are also Muslims who might suffer?

Without knowing the answers to these questions, these polls are, and will remain, guides to nothing and nowhere. Polling is an exceedingly clumsy way to find out the truth about what Muslims think. What they think surely must come from what they are taught to think, in environments in which Islam informs every area of life, in a way that no other faith does or ever has, but that can only be compared, in its overwhelmingness, to living in a totalitarian state, with the ruling ideology that is in the very air one breathes. Nevertheless, this poll will be taken seriously, and misused, in order to prolong naivete, unwariness, willful ignorance, and a willful refusal to study and to think about the unprecedented problem of millions of Muslims allowed to live, without anyone having thought much about it, in the countries of Western Europe and North America, and the consequences of that heedlessness, that nearly criminal negligence, that civilizational frivolity.

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