What Americans thought of Jewish refugees on the eve of World War II

[GMDino]

(11-19-2015, 07:34 PM)Rotobeast Wrote: In all honesty, I thought you were full of crap.
Then I started googling.....
Man, sorry I thought you were full of it.

Don't worry. He's full of it.

(11-19-2015, 11:57 PM)StLucieBengal Wrote: Haha all ok.  Glad you looked it up.

Oh look...Lucy is citing a lie again.


http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-worlds-muslims-radicalised/19899

Quote:The idea behind the video is pretty straightforward. Mr Shapiro looks at various opinion polls that have been carried out in Muslim-majority countries in recent years and highlights examples of widespread beliefs that he defines as “radical”.


He then extrapolates from the survey to the whole population of the country. For example he takes a statistic that 10 per cent of 1,000 people in a survey say they want Islamic Sharia law to be the official law of their country.



Ben Shapiro argues that if there are 100 million Muslims in that country that the sample of people in the survey accurately reflects the views of the whole population, so that’s 10 million people he claims are radicalised.



Mr Shapiro repeats this process with a number of Muslim countries and claims to reach a figure of more than 600 million radicalised Muslims.



Then he adds that “it seems fair to assume” that a similar proportion of people in a long list of other largely Muslim countries hold similar views, thus bringing the estimate to more than 800 million people – or more than half the world’s Muslims.



There are a number of issues we can raise with this.


What is a radical?


The video defines people as “radicalised Muslims” if they agree with a number of different views set out in various opinion polls.
These include: believing that “honour killings” of women can be justified; blaming western powers for 9/11;  wanting cartoonists who depict the prophet Mohammed to be prosecuted; approving of Hamas; supporting Sharia law; having positive feelings about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda; tolerating suicide bombings or attacks on civilians.


It’s debatable whether some of these attitudes, though unpalatable, are strictly evidence of a belief in radical Islam. We know, for example, that “honour killings” take place in other cultures, and that 9/11 conspiracism is not a purely Muslim phenomenon.
The reference to the cartoonists come from this 2006 NOP poll for Channel 4, in which 78 per cent of British Muslims thought that the publishers of Danish cartoons of the Islamic Prophet should be prosecuted.


Note that the word was “prosecuted” not beheaded. This appeared to indicate a wider belief among British Muslims that free speech should be curbed if it offends religious groups. Again – controversial, but not necessarily proof of “radicalisation”.
The reference to Hamas comes from the fact that the Palestinian Islamic group enjoysunusually high approval ratings in Jordan, where about half the population is of Palestinian descent.

Whether everyone who approves of the group pushing for Palestinian statehood also signs up to an extreme form of Islam is a moot point. After all, some Christian Palestinians voted for Hamas in the 2006 elections, evidently for political not religious reasons.


Sharia law


It’s perfectly true that some surveys carried out in Muslim countries show widespread support for the implementation of traditional Islamic law or Sharia, although the concept evidently meant different things to people in different countries, and there are huge regional differences.


Mr Shapiro repeatedly quotes polling carried out by the Pew Research Center, a respected US-based think-tank.

Public support for making Sharia the official law of the country varied from 99 per cent of people polled in Afghanistan to 8 per cent in Azerbaijan.



Of those Muslims who backed Sharia, support for extreme punishments like executing those who leave Islam ranged from 76 per cent in South Asia to 13 per cent in southern and eastern Europe.



Of course the Shapiro video only cites Muslim countries with very high support for the introduction of Islamic law, not those where most people oppose it.


On the other hand, while the Pew surveys covered 39 Muslim countries in 38,000 face-to-face interviews, do not include some countries where variations of Sharia are already incorporated into the legal system – notably Saudi Arabia and Iran.


...


The verdict

The first thing we have to decide is whether we trust surveys of perhaps a few thousand people to represent the views of tens of millions.


Opinion polls can never be completely accurate, though of course journalists, governments and social scientists use them all the time to take the temperature of public opinion.




What Ben Shapiro appears to have done is to take a selection of opinion poll findings that when put together represent a negative view of Muslims.




This is not to gloss over the fact that some polls do show that very illiberal values and concepts can be prevalent in some Muslim countries. Pew surveys show that intolerant attitudes to homosexuality, women’s rights and other religions – among other things – are widespread in some parts of the Islamic world.



They also show that there is a huge diversity of views among different Muslim countries and that people’s beliefs can change dramatically in a few years. A fact that is not seemingly reflected in the Ben Shapiro video.

Not that I expect you to read anything that disagrees with your lies  beliefs...


http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/nov/05/ben-shapiro/shapiro-says-majority-muslims-are-radicals/



[/url]

Quote:[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7TAAw3oQvg]In a video, Shapiro blended survey data and population statistics for 15 countries. A good example of his thesis about Islam is in the way he talked about Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation.


"It’s got almost 205 million Muslims," Shapiro said. "According to one 2009 poll, it showed almost 50 percent of Indonesians support strict Sharia law, not just in Indonesia but in a lot of countries. And 70 percent blame the United States, Israel or somebody else for 9/11. You make that calculation, it’s about 143 million people who are radicalized. You scared yet? We’re just getting started."




To get to 143 million "radicalized" Muslims, Shapiro took the 70 percent of Indonesia’s Muslims who blamed someone other than al-Qaida for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.




Shapiro then made similar extrapolations using polling data for a number of other countries, often measuring support for Sharia law -- codes of behavior in Islam. Then Shapiro summed up and applied the percentage of "radicalized Muslims" from the 15 nations to a number of other Muslim-majority countries and, with 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide, reached a shocking conclusion.



"We’re above 800 million Muslims radicalized, more than half the Muslims on Earth," Shapiro said. "That’s not a minority. That’s now a majority."



...


Shapiro consistently used the highest percentages available in the surveys to maximize the number of Muslims he could tag with the "radical" label. Secondly, he used a broad definition of radical. To choose one main example, there are many varieties of how people interpret Sharia law and support for it says little about a person’s specific beliefs.



...


For Shapiro, support for any form of Sharia law means one thing -- the believer is a radical. Accordingly, Shapiro looks at a place like Pakistan and says that 76 percent of Muslims want Sharia law in all Muslim countries. Pakistan has 179 million Muslims, therefore, "that is another 135.4 million radicals."


But looking at a 2013 Pew report on Muslims, we found that the picture is more complicated. Pew reported that 84 percent of Pakistani Muslims wanted Sharia law, but of those, nearly two-thirds said it should only apply to Muslims. Run those numbers through and you get about 54 million Muslims who think all Pakistanis should be subject to Sharia law. That’s about 60 percent fewer than Shapiro said.




We are not saying that Pakistan has 54 million radical Muslims. Our point is that more detailed polling data changes the results a great deal.

Shapiro chose one yardstick. Other analysts could with at least as much justification choose another. The impact of which question is used becomes even clearer if we look at support for suicide bombings against civilian targets.




Shapiro said actual terrorists draw "moral, financial and religious support from those who are not terrorists themselves." Even if you believe Shapiro, it doesn’t mean that attitudes towards terrorism are irrelevant. Pew asked Muslims if they supported suicide bombings against civilians. In Pakistan, 13 percent of Muslims said such attacks in defense of Islam could often or sometimes be justified.



If that’s your definition of radicals, then Pakistan has about 23 million of them. Hardly a small number, but it’s a far cry from the 135 million Shapiro counted



...


Our ruling

Shapiro said that a majority of Muslims are radicals. To make his numbers work, he had to cherry-pick certain results from public opinion surveys. Given the choice between two possible percentages, he chose the higher one. Shapiro also relied heavily on the idea that anyone who supported sharia law is a radical.




Some of the best polling work shows that Muslim beliefs are much more nuanced. Some countries where high percentages of Muslims support Sharia law show low support for suicide attacks on civilians. Large fractions of Muslims that endorse sharia law do not want it imposed on others. The meaning of Sharia law varies from sect to sect and nation to nation.




Shapiro’s definition of radical is so thin as to be practically meaningless and so too are the numbers he brings to bear.



We rate the claim False.