If 16% of American conservatives supported suicide bombings and other violence against civilian targets, do you think the MSM would characterize that proportion as "minuscule" and fret that other conservatives were being "stained" as a result?
Yet on today's Morning Joe, there was Christopher Dickey, the Daily Beast's foreign editor, describing as "minuscule" the proportion of Muslims in France who support yesterday's kind of violence. Dickey worried that other Muslims in France will suffer a resultant "stain." But is the proportion truly "minuscule?" A Pew poll from 2007 found that 16% of Muslims in France support suicide attacks and other violence against civilian targets at least sometimes, including 6% supporting such attacks "often." With about six million Muslims in France, that potentially represents hundreds of thousands of people.
Yesterday, as Newsbusters reported, we witnessed Howard Dean denying that the men shouting "allahu akbar" as they murdered at Charlie Hebdo were "Muslim terrorists." Dickey's statement represents another form of MSM denial.
Note: the Pew poll cited is coming up on eight years old. But the numbers would seem to be generally in line with more recent polls cited in the same Wikipedia article on the subject.
Note Deux: Check out Morning Joe's graphic: "Bracing for the Backlash. Anti-immigrant Sentiment in Europe." Violent backlash is of course to be condemned. But if the backlash is political, in the form of measures to restrict immigration from terrorist breeding grounds, etc., what would be wrong with that?
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Chris Dickey, the stage in France seems to be set for the most extreme type of showdowns because there is such a remarkable schism between progressives in Paris and fundamentalists that are offended by this type of speech.
CHRISTOPERH DICKEY: Well, you know, that's right. I mean, obviously, the idea is isolate the people, the extremists who are willing to kill in order to stifle free speech. You isolate them, if necessary. You hunt them down and you eliminate them. But the problem is you got five to six million people who are Muslims or of Muslim backgrounds in this country. The number who believe in the kind of jihad that we see represented in these attacks is minuscule. But the entire group gets painted with the stain of these jihadists and that's a real problem.
