"Over 38,000 people recently participated in a global survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The results constitute the first publication of its Global Attitudes Project entitled ‘What the World Thinks in 2002.’ The survey included the following questions, posed only to Muslims:
Some people think that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets are justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies. Other people believe that, no matter what the reason, this kind of violence is never justified. Do you personally feel that this kind of violence is often justified to defend Islam, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?
Before we look at the results of this study, we should appreciate the significance of the juxtaposed phrases ‘suicide bombing’ and ‘civilian targets.’ We now live in a world in which Muslims have been scientifically polled (with margins of error ranging from 2 to 4 percent) as to whether they support (‘often,’ ‘sometimes,’ rarely,’ or ‘never’) the deliberate murder and maiming of noncombatant men, women, and children in defense of Islam. Here are some of the results of the Pew study (not all percentages sum to 100):
"If you do not find these numbers sufficiently disturbing, consider that places like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories were not included in the survey. Had they been, it is safe to say, the Lebanese would have lost their place at the top of the list several times over. Suicide bombing also entails suicide , of course, which most Muslims believe is expressly forbidden by God. Consequently, had the question been ‘Is it ever justified to target civilians in defense of Islam,’ we could expect even greater Muslim support for terrorism.
"But the Pew results are actually bleaker than the above table indicates. A closer look at the data reveals that the pollsters skewed their results by binning the responses ‘rarely justified’ and ‘never justified’ together, thus giving a false sense of Muslim pacifism. Take another look at the data from Jordan: 43 percent of Jordanians apparently favor terrorism, while 48 percent do not. The problem, however, is that 22 percent of Jordanians actually responded ‘rarely justified,’ and this accounts for nearly half of their ‘No’ responses. ‘Rarely justified’ still means that under certain circumstances, these respondents would sanction the indiscriminate murder of noncombatants (plus suicide), not as an accidental by-product of a military operation, but as its intended outcome. A more accurate picture of Muslim tolerance for terrorism emerges when we focus on the percentage of respondents who could not find it in their hearts to say ‘never justified’ (leaving aside the many people who still lurk in the shadows of ‘Don’t Know/Refused’). If we divide the data in this way, the sun of modernity sets even further over the Muslim world:
"These are hideous numbers. If all Muslims had responded as Turkey did (where a mere 4 percent think suicide bombings are ‘often’ justified, 9 percent ‘sometimes,’ and 7 percent ‘rarely’), we would still have a problem worth worrying about; we would, after all, be talking about more than 200 million avowed supporters of terrorism. But Turkey is an island of ambassadorial goodwill compared with the rest of the Muslim world.