Freedom Of Religion Polls

Muslims Fear Islamic Extremism, Too

A new Pew poll shows that people in Muslim-majority nations also fear Islamic extremism. This contradicts the Republican Party’s collective message.

We know by now that Republican leaders have a habit of Islam-bashing, and that Herman Cain of course takes the cake.

The definitely-won’t-win presidential candidate called a potential Tennessee mosque “an abuse of our freedom of religion,” and said he wouldn’t hire a Muslim for his cabinet , though later changed that word to “terrorist,” as if terrorists and Muslim people are one and the same.

The GOP’s other White House hopefuls aren’t much better: when he was Minnesota’s governor, Tim Pawlenty canceled a state-run mortgage program for Muslims, and a spokesperson later bragged , “As soon as Gov. Pawlenty became aware of the issue, he personally ordered it shut down.”

The issue, in case you couldn’t tell, is that the program specifically helped Muslims.

Elsewhere in the party, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum signed their John Hancocks to a social conservative “marriage pledge” that demanded candidates actively oppose Sharia law, a synonym for “terrorism,” while Newt Gingrich compared the “Ground Zero” Mosque’s organizers to Nazis and fretted that his grandchildren could grow up in a dystopia “dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

These rote arguments, all of which rest on the assumption that all Muslims are terrorists, create barriers not only between non-Muslim Americans and Muslim Americans, but also between Americans and the Middle East, a land the GOP wants voters to believe is populated solely by suicide bombers looking to come here and blow us all to Kingdom Come.

These right wing contentions want to create the illusion that Muslim-majority nations are so foreign, so backward, so inhuman that they must either be destroyed or avoided, depending on whether the political winds blow toward intervention or isolation.

And the scary thing is that they work: about half of Americans “have an unfavorable view of Islam,” according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, and “31 percent think mainstream Islam encourages violence against non-Muslims.”

A Pew Research poll put out today also reports that 69 percent of the United States, and majorities of Western nations as a whole, are worried about Islamic extremism. This fear and Republican messaging have a symbiotic relationship: they feed into and off of one another.

Bryan Fischer: No longer alone in Bigotry | Islamophobia Today ...

CAIN: They could say that. Chris, lets go back to the fundamental issue that the people are basically saying they’re objecting to. They’re objecting to the fact Islam is both a religion and a set of laws, Sharia law. That’s the difference between any one of our other traditional religions where it’s just about religious purposes. The people in the community know best, and I happen to side with the people in Murfreesboro.

WALLACE: You’re saying any community, if they want to ban a mosque?

CAIN: Yes. They have a right to do that. That’s not discriminating based upon religion.

Did you get that? Each Islamic mosque is “dedicated” not to the pillars of Islam (faith, prayer, charity, and fasting) but to the “overthrow of the American government.” As if all the Muslims of every denomination (Sunni, Shi’ite, Sufi, liberal, conservative, etc.) are acting with one will, one goal, like the Borg (resistance is futile, you will be assimilated). He must have read that somewhere in the  Protocols of the Elders of Mecca .

Anyway, it is this last point that has Bryan Fischer super excited: he is  no longer alone in his Bigotry now that a big shot GOP candidate has legitimated his effort to ban all mosques. On what grounds can they so brazenly defy the First Amendment? The bogus talking point about Islam being a political ideology, not a religion:

•Large majorities cite the equal importance of democracy and Islam to the quality of life and progress of the Muslim world. They see no contradiction between democratic values and religious principles.

•Political freedoms are among the things they admire most about the West.

•Substantial majorities in nearly all nations say that if drafting a new constitution, they would guarantee freedom of speech.

•Most want neither theocracy nor secular democracy but a third model in which religious principles and democratic values coexist. They want their own democratic model that draws on Islamic law as a source.

•Significant majorities say religious leaders should play no direct role in drafting a constitution, writing legislation, determining foreign policy, or deciding how women dress in public.

Egyptians… express little interest in recreating their country in the image of Iran , as has been the fear among some Western commentators.

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