The Global Secular Humanist Movement (GSHM) Facebook page recently posted this quote from Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Loonwatch  To back this claim, GSHM linked to a 2007 MSNBC article with the title of Some young U.S. Muslims approve suicide hits, which in turn cited a Pew study that found that “one in four younger U.S. Muslims say suicide bombings to defend their religion are acceptable at least in some circumstances.”

(And this is where the Loonwatch lunatics show their anti-American pro-Islamist/Communist colors again –  by defending the indefensible and attempting to make suicide bombings a good thing, while equating 9/11 and suicide bombings with our bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) 

This Facebook post is now making its rounds around the internet.  Seeing as how LoonWatch loonies monitor anti-Muslim loons patriots–and Ayaan Hirsi Ali is among the best of them–I thought a response would be worthwhile.

First of all, it should be noted that suicide bombing by itself is not illegal under international law.  In a section entitled “Suicide Attacks and International Law”, Human Rights Watch* (HRW) (A UN-affiliated far left wing IslamoFascist-supporting organization) notes that “[s]uicide attacks are a method of warfare that in themselves do not violate the laws of war.”  (Except that on 9/11, we were not at war with Islam, but now we know that Islam is at war with us) This is the case if the tactic is used by legitimate combatants against purely military targets in a time and place of war. 

*Human Right Watch (HRW) is a large, well-funded liberal advocacy group presenting itself as a human rights watchdog. One of its four co-founders also founded SDS, a radical pro-communist group masquerading as a supporter of democracy. This parentage exposes the extremist origins of the group. HRW mainly criticizes the United States and Israel. Yet it studiously avoids any criticism of Arab groups who launch rocket attacks against Israeli civilians.^[4] Asconservative author and human rights activist David Horowitz stated, Human Rights Watch is a “reflexive Israel-basher … who, in his zest to pillory Israel at every turn, is little more than an ally of the barbarians”.

In fact, HRW finds that “as weapons [suicide attacks] are very discriminate: a suicide bomber is able to detonate with an accuracy that exceeds that of the most sophisticated guided weapon.”  An Iraqi resistance fighter would inflict far fewer civilian casualties from a suicide attack against a U.S. military installation than a U.S. bomber would inflict from carpet bombing Iraqi cities.  But because U.S. soldiers are the victims of suicide bombing and not carpet bombing, Americans hold the former as the epitome of evil and the latter as perfectly acceptable: hey, it’s war! 

The American mentality is very easy to understand: they suicide attack our soldiers, so it’s terrorism and morally atrocious.  We carpet bomb them, so it’s perfectly acceptable: what do you expect in a time of a war? (Hey, THEY started it)

Forget just carpet bombing: “A Gallup poll in August [of 1945] revealed that 85 percent [of Americans] approved of the use of the atomic bomb against Japanese cities.”  In fact, a poll for Fortune magazine found that another “22.7 percent of respondents agreed with the sentiment: ‘We should have quickly used many more of the [atomic] bombs before Japan had a chance to surrender.’”  Worse yet, a “December 1944 Gallup poll found that 13 percent of respondents favored the killing of all Japanese” after the war: men, women, and children; or, in the words of the chairman of the U.S. government agency the War Manpower Commission, “[t]he extermination of the Japanese in toto.”  

This is not just some sentiment of a bygone era.  To this day, a “majority of Americans surveyed think dropping atomic bombs on Japan during World War II was the right thing to do.”  (Damn right) I guarantee you that a sizable portion of Americans, if polled today, would agree with nuking Mecca, Medina, and/or Tehran. (For once, Loonwatch is right!) Even more would be comfortable with carpet bombing Muslim cities, which is what our military already does. (But not nearly enough)

What MSNBC’s article, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s quote, and the Global Secular Humanist Movement’s posting, fail to mention is that an even greater percentage of Americans–of many different religions or no religion at all–justify the targeting and killing of civilians.  This is something I pointed out in an earlier article of mine: Gallup Poll: Jews and Christians Way More Likely than Muslims to Justify Killing Civilians.  This showed that an overwhelming majority of U.S. Muslims (78%) stated that it is never morally justifiable to target and kill civilians, compared to only 38% of Protestants, 39% of Catholics, 43% of Jews, 33% of Mormons, and 56% of people with no religion/atheists/agnostics. (What LW fails to point out is that Muslims only consider MUSLIM civilians to be innocents. An Anjem Choudary told us after 9/11, nobody in the Worth Trade Center bombings was innocent because they were in America)

While Loonwatch shows the chart above, they conviently leave out the rest of the report that includes these statistics from the CIA. Using the percentages provided by the Pew poll and each country’s Muslim population according to the CIA World Factbook, we can deduce that 102,876,651 Muslims in the countries listed still find suicide bombing an acceptable option.

Few Muslims who believe suicide bombings are acceptable in the abstract will act on those beliefs. However, if only 5% acted, there would be over 5,143,832 suicide bombings. If only 1%, there would be 1,028,766. If a tenth of a percent acted, that would be 102,876. The truth is that while the percentages involved might be small, the actual numbers are significant, especially considering the damage 19 people (9/11/2001) or even 4 people (7/7/2005) can do.

In May, 2007, Pew reported that “by nearly two-to-one (63%-32%) Muslim Americans do not see a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.” The Associated Press spun the headline furiously, trying to find an acceptable angle to present the information that approximately 752,000 Muslims in America did see a conflict between their faith and modern society. Buried in this Pew survey on Muslim Americans on page 54, it states that a mere 5% of Muslims in the United States express a favorable opinion of al Qaeda. However, there are 2.35 million Muslims in the US, so that means 117,500 Muslims in the United States have a favorable opinion of al Qaeda.