Them violent Mooslems

Cursor.org is, for me, one of the Net's greatest treasures. It's so good in a meta way that I often overlook how important it is. It's as good a collection of suggestions for further reading as you're likely to find--and on good days, it's a whole lot more. One of today's (May 23) summaries is a classic of concision and makes a strong (but ultimately depressing) point at the same time.

After a Pew Research survey finds that U.S. Muslims are 'Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream,' that they are 'in line with U.S. values,' and that they "lean toward the Democratic Party, six to one," the Washington Times headlines its report on the poll, 'Young U.S. Muslims back suicide attacks.'

The only quibble I would have with this paragraph that so perfectly encapsulates how fucked we are in America right now is that it makes it seem like the Washington Times is bizarrely out of step. Oh, no. Even Anderson Cooper was "horrified -- just horrified -- that 'so many' American Muslims would support such violence."

The prejudices of conventional wisdom are myriad. One that is held by many, many Americans at our particular moment in history is the essentially ignorant and particularly dangerous idea that Muslims are predisposed to violence.

No one is better than Glenn Greenwald at finding the key weakness in such instances of complete bullshit in the mainstream media consensus. The datum from the Pew Poll that aroused such racist idiots as Mark Steyn and Michelle Malkin was this: "while 80% of American Muslims oppose attacks on civilians in all cases, 13% said they could be justified in some circumstances."

Horrifying, just horrifying.

But wait, what about context? Oh, that..... Here's Greenwald:

The reality, though, is that it is almost impossible to conduct a poll and not have a sizable portion of the respondents agree to almost everything. And in particular, with regard to the specific question of whether it is justifiable to launch violent attacks aimed deliberately at civilians, the percentage of American Muslims who believe in such attacks pales in comparison to the percentage of Americans generally who believe that such attacks are justifiable.

The University of Maryland's highly respected Program on International Public Attitudes, in December 2006, conducted a concurrent public opinion poll of the United States and Iran to determine the comparative views of each country's citizens on a variety of questions. The full findings are published here (.pdf).

One of the questions they asked was whether "bombings and other types of attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are sometimes justified"? Americans approved of such attacks by a much larger margin than Iranians -- 51-16% (and a much, much larger margin than American Muslims -- 51-13%).

In an earlier post Greenwald finds another religion whose adherents hold some pretty ugly opinions. Can you imagine the day when a headline reads "White Christians support torture"?

And majorities of white Christians -- Catholics, evangelicals and protestants -- believe in torture not merely in the improbable-in-the-extreme "ticking time bomb" scenario; rather, they believe in torture as a matter of course [emphasis in orginal] (i.e., more than "rarely" -- either "often or "sometimes"). (By stark and revealing contrast, "secularists" oppose torture in far greater numbers). [emphasis mine]. Think about how depraved that is: what kind of religious individual affirmatively believes that people should be routinely tortured, including people who have never been proven to have done anything wrong?