ONE in five British Muslims sympathises with jihadists, claimed a headline in The Sun, a British tabloid. The number referred to a poll, taken in the wake of the attacks in Paris, which in fact suggested that 20% of Muslim respondents felt “some” or “a lot” of sympathy for “young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria.” Critics of what they judged a deliberate misrepresentation of Muslim feelings towards Islamic State (IS) quickly set up a Twitter hashtag, #1in5Muslims, that generated a torrent of tweets attacking the Sun. A typical example: “#1in5Muslims have to hear this BS all the time.”
So what do Muslims around the world really think of IS? The same poll showed that 71% of Muslim Britons have “no” sympathy for expatriate British fighters, a number not so different from the 77% of other Britons who felt that way in a survey conducted in March by the same polling firm, Survation. Other post-Paris polls of Muslims have yet to appear, but Pew, a research firm that publishes annual reports of attitudes in 10 Muslim-majority countries, concluded last spring that they were “overwhelmingly negative” towards IS. It...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/1li8IZe
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