Thursday 2 February 2017

BBC Poll: 45% of UK Muslims endorse hate preachers; 11% support Jihad; 24% support Charlie Hebdo execution

This news story about a BBC poll of British Muslims is a bit old (Feb 2015), but still relevant. I note that the headline in that linked story on the Muslim Statistics Blog gets a couple of the figures wrong. Sloppy! (as Trump would tw**t). I've fixed that in my own headline.
The stats won't have changed much and the ones in this BBC poll are consistent with all the other polls, which I've gathered in "Islam in Figures" page above.
By no means are all the results bad.  Look at the "loyalty to the country":  95%.
But some really are scary, like views of Jihad, violence against the west, and killing those who blaspheme Islam. Those figures in support are too high for comfort. And we know from many other studies ("Islam in Figures" above), that a majority of Muslims want to have Sharia law in the U.K. and indeed in the rest of the west, as well.  Sharia's not Jihad or terrorism, but it's not good at all either. There's nothing I've read in the Sharia Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, which we would want to have in the liberal west. This manual is endorsed by Al-Azhar University, in Cairo, which is the oldest and most authoritative university in the Islamic world.
/Snip:
Poll of 1,000 Muslims in Britain for BBC Radio 4 Today
  • More than two in five (46%) feel that being a Muslim in Britain is difficult due to prejudice against Islam.
  • Almost all Muslims living in Britain feel a loyalty to the country (95%). Just 6% say they feel a disloyalty.
  • Nine in ten (93%) British Muslims believe that Muslims in Britain should always obey British laws.
  • One in four (27%) British Muslims say they have some sympathy for the motives behind the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
  • However, two thirds (68%) say acts of violence against those who publish images of the Prophet can never be justified while a quarter (24%) disagree.
  • Muslim women are more likely than men to feel unsafe in Britain.
  • One in nine (11%) British Muslims feel sympathetic towards people who want to fight against western interests while 85% do not.
  • Half (49%) believe Muslim clerics preaching that violence against the west can be justified are out of touch with mainstream Muslim opinion, while 45% disagree.
Take that last figure.  45% of UK Muslims think that preaching violence against the west is in touch with mainstream Muslim opinion. Around 3 million Muslims in the UK, of which 1.4 million believe that preaching violence against the west is "mainstream" belief. Even if it's not all mainstream belief, one assumes it's the belief of 45% of Muslim worldwide (the figure would surely be higher given the influence of secularism on those in the UK), so if Muslims worldwide number some 1.7 Billion, as they claim, then 765 Million Muslims believe in violence against the west.  Halve the number: it's still nearly 400 million.  Halve again: it's nearly 200 million.  There's no getting out of it: there's a disturbingly high number of Muslims who -- by their own account -- think they should perpetrate violence against the west.