“Did Arabs carry out the 9/11 attacks?” is one of the topics in a relatively recent report from Pew, The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other. H/T to Younghusband of Coming Anarchy. When asked of Muslims, the results are somewhat disturbing.
Disturbing, but perhaps not too surprising. On a visit to Korea during the summer of 2002, I met up with a Pakistani friend from my days of Korean language classes years prior. He was doing his PhD at KAIST, and there were six or seven other Pakistanis in his dorm. While my friend is (or seems to be) apolitical, I talked about 9/11 and the U.S. action in Afghanistan with his friends.
The consensus among them was that terrorism was not good and that some things UBL had done was also not good, but that 9/11 had not been carried out by Muslims; the Jews did it, and made it appear as if Muslims had. With the conviction of this conspiracy so strong, any evidence to the contrary was easily disregarded at Jewish fakery or propaganda.
After that I didn’t try to argue or present a logical case based on the known facts; sometimes you have to know when to fold ‘em (another example, discussing Kwangju with most of the ‘386’ generation in Korea). There are deep implications in that for our foreign policy objectives. By that I do not mean that the goals are unobtainable, but that they will require much more education and time to accomplish.
Steve Sailer has an apropo column today about Islamics coming to the West:
http://vdare.com/sailer/060813_disconnect.htm
The One Word Grand Strategy for Westerners and Muslims: “Disconnect”
Where’s Karen Hughes when you need her?
I sometimes overhear a conversation in the Middle East that blames it on Jews or something, but when asking them for a clarification, they always backtrack. Yet at the same time I’ve had Europeans tell me to my face that they think Bush is responsible for the attacks. Crazy.