World News

Thursday, August 4, 2011

US Muslims More Tolerant, Opposed to Violence Than Other Faiths

US Muslims More Tolerant, Opposed to Violence Than Other Faiths
by Jim Lobe, August 03, 2011

Muslims in the United States express greater tolerance for members of other faiths than any other major religious group, according to a major new survey and report released Thursday by the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center.

They are also more likely than any other religious group to oppose violent or military attacks against civilians, according to the survey, "Muslim Americans: Faith, Freedom, and the Future."

Nearly four out of five (78 percent) U.S. Muslims say that military attacks against civilians can never be justified. That compares with less than two of five Protestants (38 percent) and Catholics (39 percent) and just over four out of Jews (43 percent) who take that position, the poll found.

Similarly, 89 percent of Muslims said attacks by "an individual person or a small group of individuals to target and kill civilians can never be justified." Between 71 percent and 75 percent of Christian and Jewish respondents agreed.

The survey also found that Jewish and Muslim Americans shared many views, including how best to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Eighty-one percent of Muslims and 78 percent of Jews queried by Gallup said they supported a two-state solution.

Jewish respondents were also more likely than any other group, including Muslims themselves, to believe that Muslims face prejudice in the U.S.

While 60 percent of Muslims agreed with the proposition that "most Americans are prejudiced against Muslim Americans," that was less than the 66 percent of Jews agreed with it. Protestants and Catholics, in contrast, were roughly evenly split on the question.

Jewish respondents (80 percent) were also more likely besides Muslims themselves (93 percent) to see Muslim Americans as being loyal to the United States, compared to less than 60 percent of Christian respondents. Conversely, more than a third of Protestant and Catholic respondents questioned Muslims' loyalty, as did 19 percent of Jews.

The survey, which was based on nearly 2,500 interviews with respondents, 475 of whom said they were Muslim, poses a major challenge to efforts, primarily by right-wing Christian and Jewish groups in the U.S., to depict Muslims and Islam as a religion as fundamentally alien, if not actively hostile, to "Judeo-Christian" or "Western" values and U.S. society.

Those efforts reached a high point over the past year in the form of a largely successful effort to derail the construction of a Muslim community center the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan and an ongoing state-by-state campaign led by the neoconservative Center for Security Policy (CSP) to outlaw the application of Shariah, or Islamic law, in U.S. courts.

The latter campaign, headed by a former resident of a Jewish settlement on the occupied West Bank, has claimed that Shariah is part of plot by the Muslim Brotherhood to transform the United States into an Islamic "totalitarian" state.

Those campaigns as well as congressional hearings chaired by Republican Rep. Peter King this year on threats allegedly posed by Muslim extremism in the U.S. have affected the public's perceptions of U.S. Muslims. Their perceptions of the U.S. was not addressed by the survey, which is based on interviews conducted early last year and again last October, according to Mohamed Younis, a senior analyst at the Washington-based Gallup Center for Muslim Studies and main author of the survey analysis.

"I really can't speculate on the impact of those events," he told IPS.

The survey also didn't break down differences of views based on ethnicity or other factors among U.S. Muslims who make up the most racially diverse religious community in the country.

Asian Muslims, who comprise about 18 percent of the total Muslim population, enjoy particularly high incomes on average, for example, while African-American Muslims about 35 percent of the total are least well off, according to the last major Gallup survey, "Muslim Americans: A National Portrait," published in 2009.

Overall, Muslim Americans expressed more optimism about their lives, including their economic well-being, than all the other major religious groups, according to the survey.

They felt especially positive about President Barack Obama, the first president with Muslim roots. Eighty percent said they approved of his performance, compared to 65 percent of Jews and only 37 percent of Protestants.

On the more negative side, nearly half of all Muslim respondents (48 percent) said they had experienced discrimination over the past year, compared to an average of 20 percent of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, and 31 percent of Mormons.

And while, of all religious groups, Muslim respondents were most likely to express confidence in the honesty of elections (57 percent), they were the least likely be registered to vote (65 percent) and to express confidence in the military (70 percent) and in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (60 percent), no doubt because they have been the target of repeated investigations, especially since 9/11.

Four out of five Muslims said they do not believe it is possible to profile a terrorist based on his or her gender, age, ethnicity, or other demographic traits. Slightly less than half of the other major religious groups agree with that view.

According to a "religious tolerance index" devised by Gallup, in which respondents assess how strongly they identify with other religions, the survey found that Muslims and Mormons were the most accepting or "integrated" defined as going "beyond a live-and-let-live (or 'tolerant') attitude [to] actively seek to know more about and learn from others of different religious traditions."

Forty-four percent of Muslim respondents fit that definition, compared to 34 percent of Catholics, 35 percent of Protestants, and 36 percent of Jews.

Asked whether U.S. Muslims were sympathetic to al-Qaeda, 92 percent of Muslim respondents, 70 percent of Jews, 63 percent of Catholics, and 56 percent of Protestants responded negatively. Nonetheless, about one third of Christian respondents did not dismiss the possibility of Muslim Americans holding some sympathy for al-Qaeda.

On foreign policy in the Muslim world, U.S. Muslims tended to be more skeptical than other religious groups. Eighty-three percent of Muslims said they thought the Iraq war was a mistake, compared to 74 percent of Jews and an average of 47 percent of Christian respondents. Muslim Americans (47 percent) were also the most likely to see U.S. military action in Afghanistan as mistaken, compared to about one third of Jews and Catholics and 29 percent of Protestants.

While most respondents of all religious groups said the U.S. suffered a negative image in Muslim world, Muslim Americans (65 percent) were the only group that attributed it to "what the U.S. has done," as opposed to "misinformation … about what the U.S. has done." Seventy percent of Catholics, 65 percent of Protestants, and 55 percent of Jews attributed Washington's negative image to misinformation.

http://original.antiwar.com/lobe/2011/08/02/us-muslims-more-tolerant/

[Fwd: News Alert: Bloomberg Investing $30 Million of His Money in Program to Aid Minority Youth]

Now watch him run for mayor again.

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Re: Global Warming a hoax

I guess the goracle passed through here today as the temp hit 113*. lol

On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 3:52 PM, Bear Bear <thatbearguy@gmail.com> wrote:

some interesting new data from NASA throws doubt on the whole basis of the global warming data.

http://www.xdtalk.com/forums/xdtalk-chatter-box/180652-new-nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarmism.html

Thanks to Ezra Levant for an interesting interview with Dr. Tim Paul. A real live climatologist that worked at NASA. And gave in interesting inside view on how the computer models were flawed from the start. And designed to give the alarmist outcome.

Bear

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A Perfect Description

Transcribed from the Judge's program. He perfectly describes what happened with the debt debacle.

Judge Andrew Napolitano
Fox News Freedom Watch
Monday, August 1, 2011

Congressional leaders reached a deal that pleases almost no one, and displeases just about everyone. Basically, the "weak knee" compromisers who run the Congress did come to a meeting of the minds with the socialist impulses of the White House and agree there are probably enough votes in the Congress to permit the Treasury Department to add 2.4 Trillion dollars to the national debt, driving it from 14.3 Trillion to 16.7 Trillion. Put into perspective, that means President Obama will have added nearly 7 Trillion dollars to the government debt during just one term in office. And during that term, unemployment has gone from 7 percent to 9.2 percent. And, milk, cotton and gasoline have gone up over 40 percent. Government borrowing is the principle reason we have such high unemployment and such growing inflation in basic goods that we use all day. We can't pay back 14.3 Trillion. How can we pay back 16.7 Trillion? I guess they haven't thought about that; some people never learn.

When government borrows, it does so from two sources - from the Federal Reserve and investors. When the FED loans money to the Treasury, it prints the money that it is loaning, thus increasing the money supply, and thus increasing the cost of nearly everything. That's not good! When private investors loan money to the Treasury, they have just that much less money to invest in private productive ventures. That's not good, either! Remember, private investments produces wealth while public expenditures consume wealth.

Last night, the leaders of both parties from both houses agreed with President Obama that the Treasury should just keep doing what it does best, borrow and spend. This is crazy! Einstein has reputed to have reminded us that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. Are members of Congress, who vote to borrow at the rate of 1.6 Trillion dollars a year, year after year, and expect a different result at higher unemployment, and higher inflation insane? You decide the answer to that question.

Many members of Congress are telling you today that this is the best deal they could have gotten. Speaker Boehner even told a conference call last night that he got 98 percent of what he wanted. Well, he may be right. Apparently he did want to dig the hole of debt deeper, because that is what this bill does. Apparently he did want to increase spending every year for the next 10 years, because that is what this bill permits. Apparently he wanted to shift the burden of paying for all of this to a generation of tax payers that's yet unborn just like LBJ and his cronies shifted the burden of paying for all their borrowing to us because that is what this bill accomplishes. Yet, the Republicans claim success, and the Democrats complain of failure that this bill cuts either a Trillion, or 2.4 Trillion from spending over the next 10 years. They are misleading you.

Fact! In every year, government spends more money that it did in the previous year.

Fact! The FEDS expect to spend more in 2011 than they did in 2010, and more in 2012 than they would have spent in 2011.

Fact! What they mean by cut is that the rate of increase in spending will be cut, not the amount of spending. The amount of spending will continue to increase every year because of this borrowing.

So, did those who promised to shrink the government when they had the golden opportunity actually do so? No!

Did those who promised to stop borrowing when they had a great moment in history at which to do so actually stop it? No!

Did they get a balanced budget amendment, or an iron clad reduction in actual spending? No!

Did the President get his 2.4 Trillion in borrowed money? Yes!

Should we re-elect these people to Congress? Of course not.

Re: Tea fag rallies only attracts flies!

you're on track to lose the Senate in 2012 and maybe the White House too

your only hope is to register illegal aliens and pay them to vote for you

On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 6:43 PM, Stephen Stink <not4udude@yahoo.com> wrote:

Yep...nobody is showing up! Don'tcha just love it? Wisconsin? Workers
are rising up to the rich pigs! My! My! It's a American Spring!
Wheeeee!!!!!!!1

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