Monday, May 05, 2008

Moderate Islam

Amazing as it sounds, according to Esposito and Mogahed, the proper term for a Muslim who hates America, wants to impose Sharia law, supports suicide bombing, and opposes equal rights for women but does not "completely" justify 9/11 is . . . "moderate."

***
Some time ago there was a lot of attention given to this story :

Muslims in 40 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East were interviewed for the survey, which is part of Gallup's World Poll that aims to interview 95 percent of the world's population. [-]

About 93 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are moderates and only seven percent are politically radical, according to the poll, based on more than 50,000 interviews.

It would appear that the actual numbers, not so rosy to begin with ("Seven percent of 1.3 billion leaves us with . . . 91 million radical Islamists.") turn out upon a closer inspection to be even less so. Robert Satloff explains, here:

Yes, we can say that a Four is not that moderate . . . I
don't know. . . .You are writing a book, you are trying to come up with
terminology people can understand. . . . You know, maybe it wasn't the most
technically accurate way of doing this, but this is how we made our
cluster-based analysis.


So, there it is -- the smoking gun. Mogahed publicly admitted they knew certain people weren't moderates but they still termed them so. She and Esposito cooked the books and dumbed down the text. Apparently, by the authors' own test, there are not 91 million radicals in Muslim societies but almost twice that number. They must have shrieked in horror to find their original estimate on the high side of assessments made by scholars, such as Daniel Pipes, whom Esposito routinely denounces as Islamophobes. To paraphrase Mogahed, maybe it wasn't the most technically accurate way of doing this, but their neat solution seems to have been to redefine 78 million people off the rolls of radicals.

The cover-up is even worse. The full data from the 9/11 question show that, in addition to the 13.5 percent, there is another 23.1 percent of respondents -- 300 million Muslims -- who told pollsters the attacks were in some way justified. Esposito and Mogahed don't utter a word about the vast sea of intolerance in which the radicals operate.

2 Comments:

At 8:30 PM EDT, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Great stuff, Noga. Im going to quote your almagam on another forum.

Is that OK?

Ive done it before without asking but always reference and link.

Best regards

NWO

 
At 8:45 PM EDT, Blogger The Contentious Centrist said...

Of course it's OK. I appreciate the attribution, though. You would be surprised how some people don't get this very elementary rule of good manners.

 

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