Islam
Under Scrutiny by Ex-Muslims
Lies, Damned Lies, and CAIR's Statistics
06 June, 2007
In his Autobiography, Mark Twain offers these words of
wisdom: "There are three kinds of lies - lies, damned lies, and
statistics". When presented anything by the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), you usually get all three, with
a small helping of truth thrown in for effect.
The most recent example of this is a
letter to the editor published over the weekend in my hometown
newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch, from Ahmad Al-Akhras,
national vice-chairman for CAIR and one of my Columbus, Ohio
neighbors ("Poll shows that Muslims believe in the American
dream") . Al-Akhras is writing in response to the results of a
recent
survey of American Muslims by the Pew Research Center, "Muslim
Americans: Middle-Class and Mostly Mainstream".
As a graduate from the top quantitative analysis political science
programs in the country (The Ohio State University), one of the
things drilled into us in our political science statistics classes
and polling and data research seminars was that sometimes the
slightest word change in a survey can make all the difference in
the world. My fellow students and I also learned that you have to
look closely at what exactly is being asked to understand what is
being said, rather than trying to read into the actual question
the question set-up (an important rule discussed below). Finally,
the most important lesson that was impressed upon us was that it
is far too easy to stretch the survey's findings well beyond what
the data actually says, so caution is key.
These kinds of political science subtleties are lost on, and
otherwise largely ignored by, propagandists such as Ahmad who
twist survey results to make them serve their own ends. Let's
dissect his representations. Al-Akhras begins by saying,
The poll clearly showed that American Muslims are mainstream, highly educated, middle-class people who believe that hard work pays off. It also confirmed that, overall, American Muslims have a positive view of the larger society. They are overwhelmingly satisfied with their lives in the United States, and most say their communities are excellent or good places to live. The survey found that Muslim Americans reject extremism by larger margins than do Muslim minorities in western European countries. In fact, 78 percent of U.S. Muslims say that suicide bombings against civilians are never justified.
It is fine and agreeable that American Muslims are largely
well-integrated and mainstream in their opinions, but he seems to
say this in the hopes that you won't choke on what comes next:
Contrast this to the survey conducted by the University of Maryland's Program on International Public Attitudes, released in December 2006, which showed that only 46 percent of Americans think that "bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians" are never justified. The Pew research found that only 1 percent of those surveyed reported "suicide bombings against civilian targets are often justified to defend Islam" while another 7 percent reported the bombings are "sometimes justified in these circumstances." Again, contrast this to the 24 percent of Americans, reported in the Maryland study, who believe these attacks are "often or sometimes justified." (See the Christian Science Monitor's "The Myth of Muslim support for terror").
Yes, he's really trying to claim that Muslims are more opposed to
violence than Americans in general, by equating terrorism with
conventional warfare. More on that later.
Right up front it should be noted that Al-Akhras doesn't link to
the actual study he cites; instead, he refers to an op-ed authored
by Kenneth Ballen of the Orwellian-named Terror Free America
published back in February by the Christian Science Monitor.
When we follow the link to Ballen's article, we quickly discover
that Al-Akhras is doing nothing more than parroting Ballen's
claims. Compare this paragraph by Al-Akhras:
Contrast this to the survey conducted by the University of Maryland's Program on International Public Attitudes, released in December 2006, which showed that only 46 percent of Americans think that "bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians" are never justified.
With this strikingly similar statement in Ballen's previous op-ed:
The survey, conducted in December 2006 by the University of Maryland's prestigious Program on International Public Attitudes, shows that only 46 percent of Americans think that "bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians" are "never justified," while 24 percent believe these attacks are "often or sometimes justified."
One clear indicator that Al-Akhras has done nothing more than
cut-and-paste (what we writing professionals call "plagiarism")
from Ballen's article, is that he makes exactly the same mistake
as Ballen, calling it the "Program on International Public
Attitudes", but in fact, the center is actually the "Program on
International Policy Attitudes" (PIPA). Here we have
confirmation that Ahmad Al-Akhras leaves the heavy thinking for
others, but the low quality of analysis by Ballen gives us an idea
of the level of scholarship Al-Akhras relies upon.
When we get around to looking at the actual
PIPA study and
survey questionnaire they refer to, which was supposed to
examine Iranian and American attitudes, we find that both Al-Akhras
and Ballen violate one of the cardinal rules of polling analysis
by trying to read the question set-up into the actual question
that was asked.
In fact, in the PIPA study, those surveyed were not actually asked
about "attacks intentionally aimed at civilians". The
specific question (found on page 17, Q-I23 of the questionnaire)
was:
"Do you personally feel that such attacks are often justified, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?"
Had they thrown the word "intentionally" into the question, there
is reason to believe that there would have been a greater negative
response. It is also important to note that they are being asked a
question about justification, not support, though Ballen and Al-Akhras
are trying to subtly equate the two.
A first year political science student would immediately observe
another problem with the wording of the survey's question - the
use of the subjective terms "rarely" and "sometimes" that would
get the question tossed out of any professional polling script
(though it would be commonplace in push polling). To many people,
these two terms could mean the very same thing while others might
read into it a difference in degree, precisely what Ballen and Al-Akhras
are trying to do to make Americans seem more supportive of
violence against civilians, which is why we must also remember
that the question is one of justification, not support. The
question is measuring something entirely different than what
Ballen and Al-Akhras want it to say.
The very next question in the survey (Q-I24b) sheds some light on
the previous question's results. When asked about justifying
attacks by Palestinians against Israeli civilians, 13 percent
agreed that such attacks were justifiable - the very position
taken by CAIR that Palestinian terrorism is legitimate resistance.
Here we see that most of the responses that Al-Akhras is
supposedly deploring are in fact being offered by his own
ideological allies! Presumably, some of the same Muslims who
said attacks against civilians were justified in the Pew study are
also represented in the PIPA study.
There is some obvious sloppy methodology going on here as well
related to the follow-up question. The poll never asked Americans
two of the four follow-up questions about attacks on Iraqi
civilians (Q-I24c, with no qualification of who is doing the
targeting) and American civilians living in the US (Q-I24d). You
might think that a survey trying to gauge American attitudes on
attacks on civilians would ask a question of Americans about a war
our country is actually engaged in, but you would be wrong.
(Interestingly, 53 percent of Iranian respondents justified
attacks by Palestinians on Israeli civilians, which directly
refutes the premise of Ballen's op-ed, that only Nigerians in the
Muslim world advocate violence against civilians more often than
Americans.)
This all raises an important question: why were these questions
never asked of American respondents and why did PIPA use poorly
worded survey questions unworthy of an introductory political
science statistics class? One answer might be that when you look
at the
PIPA staff profiles, only one person out of nine staff members
is actually a trained social scientist. The rest have academic and
professional backgrounds in international policy and the media,
not polling and data analysis. This might explain some of the
amateurish mistakes in the survey.
And when we look at who
is funding PIPA, we get a picture of an ideologically-driven
organization funded by a "Who's Who" of radical Left foundations,
including the Tides Foundation (chaired by Teresa Heinz Kerry) and
the Ben and Jerry's Foundation. This should give us pause to
consider the possibility that PIPA may not be focused on the
unbiased truth.
It is important here to note what's going on behind the curtain:
Al-Akhras is engaging is the very moral equivalency that he and
his CAIR colleagues constantly deny that they ever make, equating
suicide attacks with conventional and internationally recognized
methods of warfare. Most Americans would agree with the atomic
bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the bombing of
German industrial centers during WWII. But what Al-Akhras has in
mind are Palestinian suicide bombers blowing up Israeli pizza
parlors. The two are substantially different in the minds of most
Americans. I would also note that it is US policy to never
intentionally target civilians in combat.
The Pew Study refutes two of the most regular claims offered by
CAIR. The first is the 8 million Muslim myth - the attempt by CAIR
and other Islamist organizations to inflate the Muslim population
to claim greater political clout. But Pew estimates only 2.35
million Muslims - less than one percent of the total population.
This is in line with most other official studies conducted over
the past decade by Pew, the University of Chicago, Columbia
University and others.
The second myth propounded by CAIR destroyed by this study is that
Muslims in America are everywhere oppressed and alienated by
non-Muslims. Al-Akhras himself claims that American Muslims are
well-integrated into society, and the Pew poll finds that
Muslim-American personal income and education are comparable to
the public at-large. This is hardly the portrait of a victimized
community, and is evidence that the fear-mongering which is the
staple of CAIR's public statements has no basis in fact. The
support by Ahmad Al-Ahkras for the Pew study findings contradicts
some of the very claims he has made about the downtrodden Muslim
community in the past.
As I've recently
written about elsewhere, CAIR is increasingly
non-representative of most American Muslims ("CAIR by the
Numbers"). Based on the most recent IRS Form 990 that CAIR has
made publicly available, I estimated that actual CAIR membership
in 2005 was approximately 2,615, which was down by almost half
from the year before (4,761 members in 2004). Thus, CAIR actually
represents only one out of every 100 Muslims in America. What the
Pew study tells us, when combined with CAIR's own data, is that
CAIR's radical agenda is being rejected by the vast majority of
American Muslims.
This is why we see CAIR officials such as Ahmad Al-Akhras so
desperate to get in front of the media claiming to represent the
entire community. It is fair to question the amount of attention
given this small radical fringe by the mainstream media. Less
media attention to CAIR spokesmen would be a positive step to
improve the image of American Muslims.