From Geostrategy Direct
A recent study by the Pew Research Center indicates that 10 years after the September 11 attacks, support for Islamic fundamentalism is growing within the Muslim world and that U.S. efforts to produce an ideological counterproposal to Islamic terrorism have fallen short.
Statistics released May 17 reveal, for example, that 47 percent of
Pakistan's 187 million people “sympathize” with Islamic fundamentalism and 4 percent believe that suicide bombing is sometimes justified. In Egypt, Turkey, and Jordan, the statistics show that 31 percent, 24 percent, and 36 percent respectively also support Islamist radicals who are the main force behind today's dominant terrorist groups such as Al Qaida, Hamas and
Hizbullah.
The Pakistani results indicate that some 88 million Pakistanis support Islamists and as many as 7.5 million support suicide bombing, a large pool from which extremists can recruit. Similar percentages in other Muslim states also indicated that the potential number of terrorists is growing.
Survey results also show that support for terrorist groups in key Muslim states is alarmingly high. The survey shows that in Pakistan 13 percent of the people polled have favorable views of Hamas and 14 percent favor
Hizbullah and support is said to be high for Al Qaida but survey results were not included because questions were asked at a different period and the Pew Center said the results would not be representative.
However, support for Al Qaida remains significant in Jordan (15 percent), Egypt (21 percent), Palestinian Territories (28 percent), and Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim state (21 percent). In Lebanon, only 3 percent of those polled said they supported Al Qaida.
Support for Hamas and Hizbullah in those states also was significant, ranging from 13 percent to as much as 47 percent.
The survey was based on interviews with 27,849 people in 22 states and the Palestinian territories.
Survey results on suicide bombing also were alarming with 68 percent of Palestinians saying that it was often or sometimes justified, 35 percent of Lebanese favoring the tactic, followed by Egypt (28 percent), Jordon
(13 percent), Indonesia (10 percent), Turkey (7 percent) and Pakistan (4 percent).
The survey was published days before President Obama gave a major policy address that largely avoided the problem of Islamist extremism. Obama made only three references to Islam in the address, including comments on the Arab Spring uprisings.
Obama said of Osama bin Laden that he was “a mass murderer who offered a message of hate, an insistence that Muslims had to take up arms against the West, and that violence against men, women and children was the only
path to change.”
“He rejected democracy and individual rights for Muslims in favor or violent extremism,” the president said. “His agenda focused on what he could destroy, not what he could build.”
The Obama administration has sought to reach out to Muslims around the world in an effort to mitigate the Islamist extremist threat, a policy that so far has produce no tangible results.
The favorability rating of the United States in the Muslim world also is declining, according to the survey results. In Pakistan, for example, favorable views of the U.S. declined from a high of 27 percent in 2006 to
11 percent in 2011, and in Turkey, U.S. favorability declined from a high of 52 percent in 2000 to 10 percent this year. Egypt's favorable view of the U.S. declined from 30 percent in 2006 to 20 percent in 2011.
Phi Beta Iota: This is very straight-forward. The US Government, “in our name,” is committing mass atrocities as well as discreet assassinations and renditions across the globe. Meanwhile, it elevates Wall Street and no one goes to jail for crashing the global economy, while politicians blabber about $100 billion cuts while continuing to ignore the fact that both sides of the two-party tyranny agree on borrowing $1 trillion a year as long as the public remains stupified. Morality is a priceless strategic asset. The US Government does not have it. Intelligence is a priceless strategic asset. The US Government does not have it. It is a huge intellectual and moral mistake to state that the pool of “terrorists” is growing. What is growing is the number of people who will no longer tolerate US Government war crimes that substitute might for right. That “might” is fading, and the “right” outside the USA is the crowd–the crowd of anti-USG thinking feeling people is growing, NOT a “pool of terrorists.”
See Also:
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Disinformation, Other Information Pathologies, & Repression
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Empire as Cancer Including Betrayal & Deceit
Worth a Look: Impeachable Offenses, Modern & Historic
