WASHINGTON – Four in 10 Americans believe Islam is more likely to encourage violence than other religions, up sharply from March 2002, six months after the September 11 attacks, according to a new Pew poll. The figure is lower than July 2004, when a post-9/11 high of 46 percent of respondents said the Muslim faith is more likely than others to foment attacks, but it marks a significant rise from the 25 percent recorded in March 2002 and 35 percent from just seven months ago.
In the latest national poll conducted on February 22 to March 1 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 42 percent of respondents said Islam does not encourage violence more than other ideologies, down from 51 percent in March 2002.
Parsing its own findings, the centre reported that Tea Party conservatives and conservative Republicans were most likely to link Islam to violence, with 67 percent and 66 percent respectively, while just 29 percent of liberal Democrats were. Six in 10 white evangelical Protestants were likely to do the same, while “by nearly two to one (56 percent to 30 percent), the religiously unaffiliated say that the Islamic religion does not encourage violence more than others”, Pew said.
The survey results were released ahead of controversial congressional hearings held on Thursday in Washington on homegrown Muslim terrorism. The independent, non-partisan Pew interviewed 1,504 adults by telephone in the United States for its poll, which did not report a margin of error.
