"Trouble Spots" Before My Eyes
31 May 2007
According to a recent Pew Research Center Survey, twenty-six percent of America’s young Muslims believe suicide bombings are justifiable, at least under certain circumstances. Despite this horrifying statistic, The Christian Science Monitor reported the findings of the Pew Survey under the headline: In many ways, US Muslims are in mainstream America. Like The Monitor, The Los Angeles Times also gave the survey’s findings a positive spin. Its headline assured readers that America’s Muslims are “Mostly moderate, not monolithic.”
I can’t help but wonder how The Los Angeles Times would report the results of a Pew Survey revealing that twenty-six percent of white, southern males believe lynching African Americans is justifiable, at least under certain circumstances. Do you suppose The Times’ headline would read: White, southern males, mostly moderate, not monolithic?
In the six months following 9/11, over 30,000 Americans converted to Islam. Furthermore, for the first time in American history, a majority of Americans expressed a favorable opinion of the Muslim religion (fifty-four percent). What explanation can there possibly be for this seemingly inexplicable phenomenon, a phenomenon that can only be likened to Americans turning in mass to Shintoism following the bombing of Pearl Harbor?
The simultaneous rise of Islamic terrorism in our world with Islam’s favorable poll ratings in the US must be attributed in no small part to today’s media. Petrified at the prospect of a backlash against American Muslims, America’s media has freely conducted on behalf of the Islamic religion one of the most successful PR campaigns in American history. Consequently, Islam is continually whitewashed and masqueraded as “a peaceful religion,” rather than what it really is and always has been—The Religion of the Sword.
The Associated Press touted the Pew Survey for revealing an American Muslim “community that in many ways blends comfortably into [our] society.” Of course, there are a “few trouble spots,” as the director of the Pew Research Center, Andrew Kohut, so tactfully admitted. Among these trouble spots are: (1) the justification of terrorism by one in four of America’s younger Muslims (2) the fact that twenty-nine percent of America’s Muslims either refuse to express their opinion about al-Qaida or express a favorable opinion of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization (3) the belief by one third of our Muslim population that we were wrong to invade Afghanistan after 9/11, and (4) the fact that sixty percent of America’s Muslims deny that Arab men were behind the 9/11 attacks upon our nation.
As long as you can shut your eyes to these few trouble spots, you can see America’s Muslim community like the Associated Press, a community that blends comfortably into our society. If on the other hand, you find these trouble spots “hair-raising,” as does Radwan Masmoudi, president of the Washington-based Center for the study of Islam and Democracy, you’re probably becoming like me, increasingly uncomfortable over our country’s growing Muslim population. In spite of Islam’s favorable press and the threat of being diagnosed as an Islamaphobe by today’s politically correct culture, you just can’t stop biting your nails over hundreds of thousands of terrorist supporters and sympathizers living in our midst.
Don Walton
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