U.S. Muslims Assimilated, Opposed to Extremism
Unlike Muslim minorities in many European countries, U.S. Muslims are highly assimilated, close to parity with other Americans in income and overwhelmingly opposed to Islamic extremism, according to the first major, nationwide random survey of Muslims.The survey by the Pew Research Center found that 78 percent of U.S. Muslims said the use of suicide bombings against civilian targets to defend Islam is never justified. But 5 percent said it is justified “rarely,” 7 percent said “sometimes,” and 1 percent said “often”; the remaining 9 percent said they did not know or declined to answer.
By comparison, Muslims in France, Spain and Britain were almost twice as likely to say suicide bombing is sometimes or often justified, and public acceptance of the tactic is even higher in some countries with large Muslim populations, such as Nigeria, Jordan and Egypt.
It seems that we have been fairly successful at getting Muslims to buy into the American dream. Part of that is probably our culteral attitude, but part of it is also our fairly dynamic economy that has enough ‘churn’ that even outsiders can participate and succeed reletively quickly.
It isn’t really that our Muslims are less poor, I don’t think. Poverty and extremist attitudes don’t seem to be very closely connected and it has often been noted that revolutions of any sort are driven by the middle class, not the poor. I believe that it isn’t poverty so much, but the lack of trust that things will improve in the future that fuels extremism of all kinds.
We see it in Saudi Arabia, where there are many young Saudis who arn’t poor, but don’t have a job either and don’t really have any future prospects large numbers of extremists. We see it in France where high unemployment and an inability to truly become part of French society traps people in the suburbs and leaves them permanently marginalized. And we don’t see it nearly as much in the U.S. where we have a history (however imperfect) of assimilation and a dynamic economy with lots of opportunity and low unemployment.
