Tuesday, Gallup issued a report, Muslim Americans: Faith, Freedom, and the Future.
Among the most intriguing findings: two-thirds of American Muslims say they identify strongly with the United States, about the same percentage as those who say they identify strongly with their religion. But other religious groups identified far more than Muslims with the United States. Protestants, Catholics and Jews said they identified with the United States far more strongly than they identified with their respective faiths.
Almost half of Muslim Americans said that they had experienced religious or racial discrimination in the last year. That was far more than the members of any other religious group. About one-third of Mormons said they had experienced discrimination in the last year, putting them second in that category after Muslims. About one-fifth of Jews, Catholics and Protestants said they had experienced prejudice.
On many key questions in the poll, it was American Jews whose answers most resembled those of Muslims. Jews were the most likely of any religious group besides Muslims to say that Muslims are loyal Americans, and that the war in Iraq was a mistake. Jews were just as likely as Muslims to say that American Muslims face prejudice.
A link to the full report can be found at Gallup.
The White House yesterday released a plan for combating domestic terrorism. The Christian Science Monitor says its release had been delalyed as officials struggled over how to avoid appearing to target Muslims. The Monitor reports the administration’s vision is to stop domestic extremism “by encouraging and facilitating cooperation among the key actors in the communities where home-grown extremists – whether of the neo-Nazi or Al Qaeda-wannabe variety – spring up.”
Sharia panic has emerged as a primary issue for Republican presidential hopefuls, but New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie is having none of it. At a recent press conference that deserved far more attention than it received, Christie defended his appointment of a Muslim lawyer to the state bench by saying that the Islamophobic smear campaign he had been subject to was “crazy”:
Sharia law has nothing to do with this at all. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. The guy’s an American citizen who has been an admitted lawyer to practice in the state of New Jersey, swearing an oath to uphold the laws of New Jersey, the constitution of the state of New Jersey, and the Constitution of the United States of America…this sharia law business is crap. It’s just crazy. And I’m tired of dealing with the crazies. It’s just unnecessary to be accusing this guy of things just because of his religious backround.
Meanwhile, Mike Huckabee is profiting from a children’s cartoon about 9/11.
Not crazy enough for you? Try Pamela Geller’s release today at ChristianNewsWire. Uh, Mr. President, speaking in my capacity as a key community leader, could you please look into Pamela Geller?