By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, May 30 2002 (IPS)

Seven months after the Sep. 11 attacks triggered incidents of harassment against them, U.S. Muslims reported being unhappy with parts of President George W. Bush’s anti-terrorism plan but well treated by their neighbours, a recent survey found.

While only one-third of respondents said they were convinced that Osama Bin Laden’s al Qaeda network was responsible for the attacks, slightly more than half believed that the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan was justified, according to a poll of more than 500 randomly selected Muslims interviewed late last month.

But nearly two-thirds who responded described the widespread questioning and detention of Muslims in the U.S. after Sep. 11 as “an unwarranted abuse of civil liberties”.

And 75 percent said they “strongly agreed” that “the U.S. has always sided with the Israelis against the Palestinians”, while 60 percent rejected the notion that the Bush administration “is trying to bring about a fair peace” between the two sides.

According to the poll, released here Thursday by Hamilton College and Zogby International, nearly three out of every four Muslim Americans either know someone who has or have themselves been subjected to discrimination, harassment, or physical assault since Sep. 11.

“It is clear from this poll that reports in recent months of anti-Muslim discrimination, harassment or attacks have not been exaggerated,” said Dennis Gilbert, a sociology teacher at Hamilton. The polls showed a “clear escalation” in such incidents after Sep. 11, compared to the preceding period, he added.

The poll results mostly echo findings of a larger poll of Muslim opinion conducted by Zogby for Project Muslims in American Public Square (MAPS) at Georgetown University last December. It found that 51 percent of Muslims supported the campaign in Afghanistan, and 58 percent had personally suffered or knew someone who had suffered a backlash experience since the attacks.

Half of the Muslim respondents asked last month defended U.S. military action in Afghanistan as justified although 43 percent disagreed with that assessment, a finding that is strikingly consistent with the December survey.

Despite their experiences after Sep. 11, 70 percent of the respondents described their fellow non-Muslim citizens as either “friendly” or at least “neutral” toward Muslims. The same percentage reported that non-Muslims had “personally conveyed support” for them after the attacks.

Interestingly, opinions on U.S. support for Israel differ only slightly from those found in a general public opinion poll take in early May by the University of Maryland. It found that two thirds of Americans favoured a strictly neutral approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but almost 60 percent said that the Bush administration took Israel’s side.

Almost half of the respondents (47 percent) in the Hamilton/Zogby survey said they agreed that the United States should try to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, a finding that should cheer anti-Saddam hawks in Bush’s administration.

The number of Muslims living in the United States is a source of controversy, particularly between the Muslim and Jewish communities, which both vie for the status as the most popular religious group in the country after Christianity. Because of the division between church and state in the U.S., the census does not include religious data.

While most analysts agree there are about six million U.S. Jews, estimates of the number of Muslims range from about two million on the low end to seven million on the high end. Zahid Bukhari, director of the MAPS project, said he believed the best estimate was between five and six million.

Respondents of the Hamilton/Zogby poll were identified by Muslim-looking names in telephone directories – a method that likely undercounts African-American Muslims and converts – and were asked to confirm whether they were indeed Muslim.

Of those identified in this way, 30 percent said they were native-born, one-third were born in an Arab country, 16 percent in Pakistan, and the rest somewhere else. Ninety percent of respondents said they were U.S. citizens.

When asked to identify themselves by race or ethnicity, 17 percent described themselves as white; eight percent as African American; 2.6 percent as African; 29 percent as Arab, and 31 percent as Asian.

But those differences were not reflected in the poll results, suggesting a political coherence among U.S. Muslims.

Of the sample, 63 percent were college graduates or had graduate degrees, making the group second only to Jews in educational achievement and far ahead of the rest of the U.S. population where only 26 percent have completed college studies. U.S. Muslims are also exceptionally young: only 38 percent are over the age of 45, compared to 52 percent of all U.S. adults.

Politically, a strong plurality considered themselves independent, while 36 percent said they were Democrats, twice as many as those who called themselves Republicans, despite the fact that about half of U.S. Muslims voted for Bush in the 2000 elections.

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