AP Writer Manufactures Lie in Story on Pew Muslim Study

UPDATE: Welcome JihadWatch readers. Thanks to Robert Spencer for the plug.

Earlier this week I had an article published, "Lies, Damned Lies and CAIR's Statistics", in response to a letter to the editor published by Ahmad Al-Akhras, national vice chairman of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), in last Saturday's Columbus Dispatch. My article notes that Al-Akhras substantially misrepresented the findings of a December 2006 survey in order to claim that Americans generally are more prone to endorse attacks against civilians than what was found in the American Muslim population in a recent Pew Research Center study which found that 26 percent of American Muslims age 18-29 would justify suicide bombings.

This evening I was reading an entry by Robert Spencer at JihadWatch responding to an article by Associated Press Religion reporter Eric Gorski, "Young U.S. Muslims Face Mistrust". Spencer notes a number of problems in Gorski's article, which I won't recount here, but the AP article mentions the same study cited by Al-Akhras. Gorski says:

A December 2006 survey by the University of Maryland's Program on International Attitudes found 24 percent of Americans believe "bombings and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians" are often or sometimes justified. The poll found no significant variance based on age.

His statement on this poll is only two sentences long, but there are several misrepresentations here in addition to one outright lie.

The first problem is that they December 2006 wasn't done by the "University of Maryland's Program on International Attitudes", but the Program on International Policy Attitudes (does the AP have any factcheckers?), which is not part of the U of Maryland at all, but is a joint project between the Center on Policy Attitudes (COPA) and the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), University of Maryland. It is an independently-funded organization with loose ties to UofM, but both Al-Akhras and Gorski have stretched PIPA's relationship with the university to try to give it more clout. The poll was not conducted by the university, however, as they claim.

As I noted in my previous article, the question they refer to in the PIPA study (survey questionnaire) does not ask about intentional attacks. The specific question (found on page 17, Q-I23 of the questionnaire) was:

"Do you personally feel that such attacks are often justified, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?"

There is no mention of intentionality in the question itself, but both Al-Akhras and Gorski go out of their way to stress that point.

But the absolutely categorical lie Gorski engages in is when he says, "The poll found no significant variance based on age." But when you look at the PIPA study, the responses are not broken down by age - Gorski conjures this fact completely out of thin air! In fact, the American respondents aren't even broken down by age anywhere in the study or the questionnaire. He has to manufacture it himself.

It's nothing new, of course, for an AP writer to start "making it up", but this manufactured lie is apparently acceptable, because it's victim is the American public. If Gorski had made up some lie about the Pew Study findings on Muslims, he would be without a job today; but when he libels the public at large and that libel passes through the whole AP editorial and factchecking process without a single concern apparently raised, this should raise concerns about the credibility and reliability of the entire Associated Press organization.

Like a dog returning to its vomit, there is a reason why the Islamists and their media establishment apologists keep returning to this PIPA study: they have been successful thus far at twisting and manipulating the poll results to try to divert attention from the shocking findings of the Pew study. And as I stated in my previous article, they have to engage in an equivalence between conventional and internationally recognized warfare (the subject of the PIPA poll) with terrorism (the Pew study asked specifically about suicide bombings) to even try to bring the PIPA study into play. This equivalence between conventional warfare and terrorism is precisely the same that Islamists constantly tell us that they don't make (equating the bombing of factories in Germany during WWII and the HAMAS suicide bombing of Israeli pizza parlors filled with Jewish teenagers).

But not even the Islamists are reading from the same script when it comes to this PIPA study. While Ahmad Al-Akhras of CAIR cites "24 percent of Americans, reported in the Maryland study, who believe these attacks are "often or sometimes justified", Ingrid Mattson, President of the Islamic Society of North America, cites this exact same PIPA study and says:

"And what am I to make of the fact that according to the University of Maryland, 51% of Americans believe that “bombings and other types of attacks against civilians are sometimes justified?"

Citing the exact same poll, CAIR and ISNA come up with two entirely different results for this same question - 24 percent and 51 percent! Can't these clowns get it right? You would think the Islamists would at least collaborate a little more closely so they can tell the same lies. But maybe Mattson thinks it's OK to lie about Americans, because she is Canadian.

Whether it's CAIR, ISNA or the Associated Press, it's all taqiyya to me...