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One in Every Seven Young Muslims Supports Terrorism While MoveOn.org was posting the usual "Jews with divided loyalties" slurs in its Action Forum and official bulletins, and Tufts University's Committee on Student Life was proclaiming that "labeling Islam violent is unacceptable in any way, shape, or form," a Pew Research Center survey shows that one of every seven Muslims under age 30 in the U.S. advocates terroristic violence. Meanwhile, three of every five Muslims under age 30 says his or her primary loyalty is to Islam and not to the United States.
As shown here, the Pew study used a sufficiently large sample to obtain reasonably reliable results.
Despite the challenges, the Pew study was able to complete interviews with 1,050 Muslim American adults 18 years old and older from a probability sample consisting of two sampling frames. Interviews were conducted by telephone between January 24 and April 30, 2007 by the research firm of Schulman, Ronca & Bucuvalas, Inc. (SRBI). After taking into account the complex sample design, the average margin of sampling error on the 1,050 completed interviews with Muslims is +/-5 percentage points at the 95% level of confidence.The survey shows that, even among Muslims 30 or older, 40 percent say their primary loyalty is to Islam and not the United States. Since more than one in every seven young Muslims condones terroristic violence, it defies common sense to label scrutiny of Muslims at airports as "profiling."
We are a bit rusty on our Bayesian statistics but, when the preponderance of terrorism comes from individuals who identify themselves as Muslims (Timothy McVeigh and that Cho individual being the rare non-Muslim exceptions), and one of every seven Muslims under 30 advocates terrorism, it makes sense to give Muslims a second look when security is an issue.
This is not to say that it is desirable (or even legal) to select people for extra security screening on the basis of their religious identity, as might be ascertained from possession of Korans and so on. Noting that more than five of every seven young Muslims do NOT support terrorism, and that our country has already apologized for its shameful behavior toward citizens of Japanese ancestry during the Second World War, we must remember that most Muslims are peaceful and law-abiding Muslims. On the other hand, persons of Muslim identity can hardly complain when they draw attention to themselves by chanting to Allah and then, after boarding an aircraft, asking for metal seat belt extenders they do not need while behaving as if they are going to hijack the plane.
The bottom line is, however, that the Muslim community itself must take a leadership role in dealing with these problems. As an example, Mahdi Bray's Muslim-American Society should, instead of committing acts of civil disobedience, be reminding Muslim-Americans that their primary loyalty should be to the United States and not to Islam. Anyone whose loyalty lies elsewhere is free to renounce his or her citizenship, leave our country, and move elsewhere. We do not have a Berlin Wall to keep in people who want to live under barbaric Sharia law instead of civilized American laws, and there are plenty of countries where those who do want to live under Sharia will doubtlessly fit right in.