A large survey of 7000 students, aged 14-16 by the National Centre for Scientific Research, has found that a third of French Muslim youth had “fundamental religious views.” To clarify what “fundamental religious views” mean: 32 percent of them did not fully condemn the jihadist bloodbath at the Charlie Hebdo offices for the sharia crime of blasphemy, or the massacre at the Hyper Cacher grocery store shortly thereafter.
This finding is a troubling breakaway from the usual claim that only around 10 percent of Muslims globally ascribe to violent jihad. Right after the Charlie Hebdo attack, the Daily Beast proclaimed that 12 percent of the world’s Muslims support jihad terrorism. The report attacked “pundit/comedian” Bill Maher’s comment:
“I know most Muslim people would not have carried out an attack like this. But here’s the important point: Hundreds of millions of them support an attack like this. They applaud an attack like this.”
The ludicrous Daily Beast report went on to say:
“Just as in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other faiths, there are fanatics, conservatives, moderates, progressives, and far-left-progressives in the Muslim world.”
The folly of such false comparisons is glaring. Jews, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists have not murdered 11 million of their coreligionists since 1948. They don’t behead or stone people or chop off their hands for theft. They don’t invoke religious texts to justify the mass rape of infidel women. They don’t capture sex slaves and brutalize them, outline elaborate plans to sabotage Western civilization from within and replace its free societies with the sharia, endeavor to destroy Israel, seek global conquest, preach hatred and incite violence from places of worship, etc. While all Muslims certainly do not engage in such heinous activity, it cannot be denied that Islamic supremacists and jihadists have declared war on the world.
Further food for thought: right before Christmas, a Policy Exchange Poll out of the UK showed that half of all Muslims, if they knew someone with Islamic State links, would not report this fact to police.
“Study: Third of France’s Young Muslims Hold Fundamentalist Religious Views”, by Virginia Hale, Breitbart, March 12, 2017:
A study looking at the prevalence of radical ideology among high school students has found that French Muslims are much more likely to tolerate violence and to hold fundamentalist religious views than other pupils.
The National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) study involved more than 7,000 students, aged between 14 and 16, who were studying at 21 schools and four academies in France.
Sociologists who conducted the survey, Anne Muxel and Olivier Galland, stressed the sample is not representative of French youth as a whole.
The schools included in the study are located in poor areas, with overrepresentation in the student body of pupils from working class backgrounds (41 per cent), students with immigrant backgrounds (38 per cent), and Muslims (25 per cent).
The CNRS reported that 11 per cent of respondents overall adhere to religious fundamentalism, which rises to 32 per cent among Muslim youths.
Mr. Galland noted a “striking difference” between the figure compared with six per cent of Christians and 0.6 per cent of non-Muslims identified by the governmental research organisation as “religious absolutists”.
“However, two-thirds of Muslims do not adhere to these ideas,” the sociologist added.
On the topic of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher Islamist terror attacks, which took place in Paris in 2015, 32 per cent of respondents would not fully condemn the actions.
Just under 25 per cent of the young people questioned said they consider certain violent and deviant behaviours legitimate (stealing a scooter, confronting the police, and taking violent action for ideological reasons).
A third of Muslim schoolchildren (33 per cent) defended such actions, compared to 20 per cent of Christians, and 22 per cent of pupils who declare themselves as irreligious.
44 per cent of the students who were both classed as having fundamentalist religious views and who said they tolerate some forms of violence said it’s acceptable “in some cases in today’s society … to take up arms and fight for his religion”.
70 per cent of this group do not condemn the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher Islamist terror attacks.
“The spread of radical ideas is around three times stronger among young Muslims than in the sample as a whole,” said Mr. Galland.
“But it is ultimately only a very small proportion: radical absolutism is far from being a majority amongst Muslims!” the sociologist emphasised.
“A purely economic explanation does not seem valid,” said Mr. Gallard on the topic of identifying factors that increase a person’s susceptibility to radical beliefs. “Membership of the Islamic faith is the biggest predictive factor.”…..