Question for Iraq war supporters

[AllieBaba]

Well 7 tens of thousands could have danced in the streets, and every one could have been an enemy.

I remember them dancing.

 

[maineman]

Well 7 tens of thousands could have danced in the streets, and every one could have been an enemy.

I remember them dancing.

quit wiggling. do you remember any footage - or any news reports - of TENS OF THOUSANDS of them dancing in the street?

Or do you remember the report where a giant soccer stadium in IRAN held a moment of silence and the place was fucking SILENT! One would think that if, as your buddies have stated, the majority of muslims are extremists who hate us and only a small minority are moderate and reasonable people, most of that stadium would have been cheering and not silent, wouldn't one?

 

[AllieBaba]

I haven't heard any righty say they think the majority of muslims hate us.

That's just rhetoric the left uses to keep people mad at each other, and to perpetuate the hate.

 

[Doug]

About 90% of Muslims do not support terrorist attacks on innocent civilians.

About 10% do. That's about 100 million dancers.

 

[M14 Shooter]

About 90% of Muslims do not support terrorist attacks on innocent civilians. About 10% do. That's about 100 million dancers.

Even if is 0.1% - that's 1 million.

 

[AllieBaba]

The funny thing is, from what I've heard, it's more like 25 percent who don't think it's wrong to kill non-Muslims.

 

[maineman]

I haven't heard any righty say they think the majority of muslims hate us.

That's just rhetoric the left uses to keep people mad at each other, and to perpetuate the hate.

I guess you missed you good buddy, Alpha's post #465

"Its moderate Muslims that are the minority and the vast majority of them only differ in the degree of their fanaticism....."

itching yet?

 

[AllieBaba]

What is with your compulsion to link people together? Alpha isn't, to my knowledge, my buddy, and I didn't read the post.

Ya feed on the hate, I can see that...why should you be any different than any of YOUR hater lib buddies?

 

[mattskramer]

The funny thing is, from what I've heard, it's more like 25 percent who don't think it's wrong to kill non-Muslims.

Link?

 

[AllieBaba]

I don't have one...but it is something I heard that came from a poll just a couple of months ago. It hit the news pretty hard, it was a poll of American Muslims. I don't remember what the actual question was. It might have been would you support a Muslim take-over of the US. I'll see if I can find it.

 

[Steerpike]

I don't have one...but it is something I heard that came from a poll just a couple of months ago. It hit the news pretty hard, it was a poll of American Muslims. I don't remember what the actual question was. It might have been would you support a Muslim take-over of the US. I'll see if I can find it.

I think the question was whether there might be some situations in which killing to protect Islam was warranted. Or something like that. Not a blanket endorsement of killing non-Muslims.

 

[AllieBaba]

Found it!
Reuters, May 07:

Poll finds some U.S. Muslim support for suicide attacks
Tue May 22, 2007 3:20pm EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - About one-quarter of young American Muslims believe to some extent that suicide bombings can be justified to defend Islam, while nearly 80 percent of all U.S. Muslims reject such attacks, a survey showed on Tuesday.


http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2244293620070522

 

[AllieBaba]

Twenty five percent support of suicide attacks (which include 911) in AMERICA is a pretty steep number.

Can only assume it's higher elsewhere.

 

[M14 Shooter]

Found it!
Reuters, May 07:

Poll finds some U.S. Muslim support for suicide attacks
Tue May 22, 2007 3:20pm EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - About one-quarter of young American Muslims believe to some extent that suicide bombings can be justified to defend Islam, while nearly 80 percent of all U.S. Muslims reject such attacks, a survey showed on Tuesday.
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2244293620070522

Even if is 0.1% - that's 1 million.

 

[maineman]

What is with your compulsion to link people together? Alpha isn't, to my knowledge, my buddy, and I didn't read the post.

Ya feed on the hate, I can see that...why should you be any different than any of YOUR hater lib buddies?

I feed on organic food. And alpha is a rightie....

 

[AllieBaba]

Point is, whether he is or not, you don't know who my buddies are and most righties vary greatly from each other.

Unlike most lefties, who can be counted on to walk the same narrow line and cite the same inane drivel.

 

[mattskramer]

Found it!
Reuters, May 07:

Poll finds some U.S. Muslim support for suicide attacks
Tue May 22, 2007 3:20pm EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - About one-quarter of young American Muslims believe to some extent that suicide bombings can be justified to defend Islam, while nearly 80 percent of all U.S. Muslims reject such attacks, a survey showed on Tuesday.


http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2244293620070522

About one-quarter of young American Muslims believe to some extent that suicide bombings can be justified to defend Islam

"It's not something they see themselves engaging in. It's more of them seeing what's happening abroad and ... feeling that in these situations, suicide bombings are justified for others,"

This poll, though surprising, does not say that 25 percent of all Muslims don't think it's wrong to kill non-Muslims.

 

[maineman]

Point is, whether he is or not, you don't know who my buddies are and most righties vary greatly from each other.

Unlike most lefties, who can be counted on to walk the same narrow line and cite the same inane drivel.

you defended his assertions...and you suggested that knowing one's enemy is not necessary.

and I NEVER cite drivel.

 

[AllieBaba]

You do if you cite lib talking points....
Did I defend his assertions? I don't remember actually doing that. I remember saying I remember the riots, and pointed out that there were enough anti-American Muslims to make up 10s of thousands.

 

[Doug]

The Economist had a pretty sober assessment, avoiding either rightwing hysteria or liberal goody-two-shoes-talk, last year.

Testing Muslim views

If you want my opinion
Mar 8th 2007
From The Economist print edition


It's just about possible to assess the attitudes of the world's Muslims—but much harder to interpret the results


BACK in November 2001, as American bombers were driving Afghanistan's Taliban rulers from power, a reporter asked Donald Rumsfeld, then defence secretary, if the campaign was perversely boosting support for the Islamists. His reply was typically tart: it was “very difficult to go down and do a Gallup poll”—so he was “not inclined to chase that rabbit”.

Ever since then the Gallup polling group, based in Washington, DC, and many other research pundits have tried to prove Mr Rumsfeld wrong. They have used all the wizardry of market research to gauge the attitudes of Muslims all over the world—how they see democracy, what they like and dislike about the West, whether they condone terrorism.

And sure enough, some find the bottle of anti-Western extremism half-full, while others find it half-empty. It could hardly be otherwise when so many people on the streets of Cairo or Karachi seem to view the Western world with a confusing mix of awe, jealousy, admiration and resentment. And feelings about the big questions of culture and geopolitics are as ambivalent in the rich world as they are in Muslim states. Take a recent survey (see chart) of 28,000 people in 27 countries for the BBC World Service. Steven Kull of the University of Maryland, who co-produced the research, deduced that most people reject the idea of a “clash of civilisations”. But it would have been easy to draw a pessimistic conclusion: it is not comforting that 51% of Indonesians, or about 100m people, do expect a clash.

Still, however intractable reality may be, pollsters are under pressure to send a clear message. For the newspaper-skimming public, it may often be the spin that distinguishes one poll from another, not the tangled reality that emerges from the numbers. As pollsters know, if they are to hold the attention of busy people, they can't just say, “It's all very complicated.”

Gallup, for example, has in recent weeks put on a media road-show to promote the results of its second in-depth survey of Muslims in mainly Islamic countries. The first was conducted in 2001 and 2002, the follow-up in 2005 and 2006. What the data show is not reassuring to Americans: in most places, the percentage holding “unfavourable views” of the United States has risen—from 64% to 79% in Saudi Arabia, 33% to 62% in Turkey, 41% to 49% in Morocco. (Exceptions do exist: in Iran the figure fell from 63% to 52%.)

What Gallup's analysts have been stressing, however, is a more nuanced point. Muslims of both sexes, while strongly, and often increasingly, attached to their faith and its legal tradition, also say they admire some things about the Western world, including its free speech and democracy. In almost every country that Gallup surveyed, women as well as men thought that sharia, Islam's sacred law, should be the main or the sole basis of legislation. But female respondents saw no contradiction between this affirmation and the idea of rights and opportunities for women. A broad conclusion drawn by Gallup's wonks is that to be devoutly religious need not imply rejecting all Western values; and that religiosity is not correlated with extremism or violence.

A recent survey of British Muslims, commissioned by Policy Exchange, a right-of-centre think-tank, was presented to the public, and interpreted by the media, in almost the opposite spirit. And regardless of spin, there were some startling findings, suggesting that hard-line views are waxing not waning. Some 37% of Muslims aged between 16 and 24 would prefer to live under sharia law, against 17% of those over 55. In the younger group, 36% favoured death for those who abandon Islam, versus 19% of the oldies. Approval for groups like al-Qaeda was voiced by 13% of the youngsters and 3% of the old folk.

But Munira Mirza, one of the report's co-authors, felt that some conclusions drawn by the media (that Britain was nurturing a generation of extremists), were overdone. What the polls partly reflected, she thinks, is the alienation of youngsters of all backgrounds: since Muslims have an “alternative narrative”, they jump at the chance to give sharp answers to pollsters.

How can anybody tell? At a technical level, pollsters say the problems they face in a traditional culture—like reluctance to discuss hard questions with strangers—are formidable, but superable. Gallup's field-work consists of hour-long interviews in which the questioner is usually the same sex and nationality as the respondent. “Nothing sensitive can be asked at first, you just work to persuade people there is no right or wrong answer,” says Richard Burkholder, a Gallup researcher.

Another problem in Muslim lands, says Mary McIntosh of Princeton Survey Research, an American firm, is that when women are polled, male relatives insist on listening in and correcting the replies.

But Gallup's chief executive, Jim Clifton, believes that his group's research into Muslim opinion is sound enough to have huge policy implications. “Most political leaders believe a war about religion is going on, when we know it's a war about politics and poverty. Many people say Muslims hate our freedom, but they respect it.”

Mindful of its independence, Gallup declined a proposal from the Pentagon to sponsor its work in Iraq. But no study takes place in a total vacuum; could it be that more innocuous tie-ups affect the way research is presented? Since 2006, Gallup's partner in polling Muslims has been a London-based charity called the Coexist Foundation, whose trustees include a Saudi businessman, Mohammed Jameel, and some senior British Christians and Jews. Its mission is to improve relations between the three faiths and fight prejudice.

With a partner like that, is there a sub-conscious tendency, at least, to accentuate the positive—just as right-of-centre groups may have a stake in showing that multi-cultural policies are failing? Mr Clifton points out that Gallup has an overwhelming interest in guarding its integrity. “We have a name to protect,” he insists. “People may say we appear to be leaning towards the Muslims, but what we are finding is just the truth.” Besides, one consistent Gallup finding is that 8% of Muslims round the world—at least 80m people—strongly support terrorist acts against America. That can hardly be described as “happy talk”.

Source