In “Just Like Us! Really?: Gallup says only 7 percent of the world’s Muslims are political radicals. Yet 23 percent think the 9/11 attacks were in some way justified” in The Weekly Standard, Robert Satloff exposes yet more that is wrong with the Saudi-funded Islamic apologist John Esposito’s soothing “No Extremists Here” survey of the Islamic world:
Mogahed publicly admitted they knew certain people weren’t moderates but they still termed them so. She and Esposito cooked the books and dumbed down the text. Apparently, by the authors’ own test, there are not 91 million radicals in Muslim societies but almost twice that number. They must have shrieked in horror to find their original estimate on the high side of assessments made by scholars, such as Daniel Pipes, whom Esposito routinely denounces as Islamophobes. To paraphrase Mogahed, maybe it wasn’t the most technically accurate way of doing this, but their neat solution seems to have been to redefine 78 million people off the rolls of radicals.
The cover-up is even worse. The full data from the 9/11 question show that, in addition to the 13.5 percent, there is another 23.1 percent of respondents–300 million Muslims–who told pollsters the attacks were in some way justified. Esposito and Mogahed don’t utter a word about the vast sea of intolerance in which the radicals operate.
And then there is the more fundamental fraud of using the 9/11 question as the measure of “who is a radical.” Amazing as it sounds, according to Esposito and Mogahed, the proper term for a Muslim who hates America, wants to impose Sharia law, supports suicide bombing, and opposes equal rights for women but does not “completely” justify 9/11 is . . . “moderate.”
Read it all.