WaPo: Americans’ View of Islam Lower than After 9/11

[A] growing proportion of Americans are expressing unfavorable views of Islam, and a majority now say that Muslims are disproportionately prone to violence, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The poll found that nearly half of Americans — 46 percent — have a negative view of Islam, seven percentage points higher than in the tense months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when Muslims were often targeted for violence.

What’s changed? I agree with the article’s suggestion that it was the cartoons. We perceived that the vast majority of Muslims believed that violence was an appropriate response to a Danish newspaper printing some fairly mild cartoons, for circulation in Denmark. If Danes shouldn’t have the freedom to print and read what they want in their own country, we reason, neither are we. The Abdul Rahman controversy sealed it. If a man who converts from Islam to Christianity can’t live safely in a democratic Muslim nation, it’s fair to say that Islam has a tolerance problem.

The implications of the cartoon rage is wider, of course. The message of that episode is that Islam — as practiced by a perceived (fairly or otherwise) majority of Muslims — is irreconcilable with the right of Americans to say, print, write, and read what they want in their own country. Judging by stories like this and this, the censorship has had considerable success.

We can take two lessons from this: first, that violence works and will be rewarded by the self-censorship of the cowardly; and second, that the censorship comes at the price of earning universal contempt. And neither of those results is good news.