[Vision2020] Muslims upbeat about life in U.S.

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of today's (August 3, 2011) Spokesman-Review.

------------------------------

Muslims upbeat about life in U.S.
Poll finds most are more optimistic than members of other religious groups


WASHINGTON – A Gallup poll released Tuesday found that most Muslim Americans are very optimistic about their lives in the United States and are loyal to a country that’s given them a wealth of economic opportunities, even though some Americans continue to treat the community with hostility.

But the report also identified one area of concern: how to improve the strained relationship between Muslims and other Americans.

Experts said the survey findings were important because they could mitigate some of the concerns Americans have about the susceptibility of American Muslims to extremist causes. The thinking goes that if people are satisfied with their lives, they’re unlikely to get sucked into radical movements, which often prey on economically vulnerable people.

Asked to rate what their lives would be like in five years, Muslim Americans gave higher ratings than members of most other religious groups did. On a 1-to-10 scale, Muslims rated their future lives at 8.4, while Americans of other religious groups give average ratings of 7.4 to 8, Gallup pollsters said.

Mohamed Younis, a senior Gallup analyst, attributed Muslims’ positive outlook to a range of reasons, from political factors to the slowly recovering economy having improved their standard-of-living expectations.

“We definitely see a lot of approval for President Barack Obama and a changed rhetoric around the role of Muslims in America and Muslim-U.S. relations globally,” Younis said. The survey found Obama’s job approval rating at 80 percent among American Muslims.

The survey, which consisted of two polls conducted from January 2010 to April 2011, comes from the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center with some financial support from the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. The firm surveyed 1,500 Muslim Americans and thousands of Americans from other faiths, with a margin of error of 0.3 to 6.6 percentage points.

With the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks approaching, some Americans are still skeptical of the allegiances of Muslims who live in the United States. The poll found that more than a third of Protestants and Roman Catholics didn’t believe that Muslim Americans were loyal to the U.S.

More than nine in 10 Muslims surveyed thought that their community was loyal.

The poll also found that many Americans of different religious groups say that Muslims aren’t speaking out enough against terrorism. More than 60 percent of Protestants, Catholics and Jews say that Muslims should condemn terrorist attacks more publicly.

Rabbi David Saperstein, the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said interfaith leaders had been unsuccessful in promoting how well-assimilated most Muslims were in America. This is in contrast to some European countries, where many Muslims have found integrating into the mainstream culture difficult.

“We really need to change the images of Islam to more accord with the reality. (The survey) gives us a lot to work with,” Saperstein said.

D. Paul Monteiro, the associate director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, said that one way for Muslim Americans to increase other Americans’ level of trust was to engage person-to-person with people of other faiths.

“When a person who is a Protestant or any other religion meets a person who is Muslim, the conversation changes. The perception changes,” Monteiro said.

“As long as someone … doesn’t know personally someone who is Muslim, then they’re open and susceptible to some of this rapidly spreading misinformation that even in some parts of the press presents a not-so-great picture of Muslims or Islam as a whole.”

------------------------------

Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
 
"The Pessimist complains about the wind, the Optimist expects it to change and the Realist adjusts his sails."

- Unknown

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20110803/5a05f959/attachment-0001.html