A little professionally produced, 58 minute-plus video titled What a Billion Muslims Really Think tries to develop sympathy for the "non violent" Muslims of the world.
Financed by Arab organizations, and largely populated with Muslims or employees of Arab organizations, the film goes on, seemingly forever, about how a Gallup pollster group, headed by a Muslim woman, developed a questionnaire and gathered data from Muslims around the world.
According to the chief pollster, "only one percent of all Muslims in the world are violent" (see http://tinyurl.com/2djwkgv).
She might be right.
But the silence of the remaining 99 percent who accept their fellow Muslims atrocities suggests that this "silent majority" indeed agrees, or at least fails to disagree with any visibility, with the one percent.
Well into the film and all we learn is how the Gallup poll was developed.
The film was interrupted by a commercial - interesting since there was a long list of sponsorship credits at the beginning of the project - and never resumed where it left off; I never found out what 1 billion obviously silent Muslims really think.
One point the film made early on is that only about 15 percent of the Muslim world's population are Arabs. What was ignored is that even non-Arab Muslims, such as those in Indonesia, are practitioners of violence.
All Muslims bow to Mecca, one of two places holy to Mohammed, the other being not Jerusalem but Medina, also in Saudia.
If Muslims ARE "peace loving" folks with a different religion and customs, why don't they speak up?
OK, I understand that "speaking up" may be hazardous to a Muslim's life is a Muslim country - humm, that says something about Islam and thought control - but why don't "peace loving" Muslims speak up in countries where they have - and use - free speech, countries like the U.S., Britain, Sweden, The Netherlands, etc. In Denmark they called for the murder of someone whose lack of Muslim sensitivity offended them. No trial, just "catch and kill."
They rail against the governments in "free societies" and look to those free societies for support them when they try to over-throw one despotic government for another; ask yourself: Is Egypt any better off with the Moslem Brotherhood in control?
They - peace loving Muslims - seem to have a different mentality than Westerners, a mentality that is in conflict with the Western mentality. It may be suitable to Indo-China where Islam has made great inroads, but not in Europe or North America.
Jews from Arab states - Morocco, Libya, Tunis, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere - manage to integrate into European and North American society, where, for all their religious uniqueness, they manage to become loyal, law-abiding citizens of their host country.
Muslim Arabs from the same countries bring their supremacist, racist mentality and expect it to be accepted by people who have long challenged the theory of religious or racist supremacy, a philosophy that parallels the nazis' (with whom the Arab nations aligned themselves.
I know there are good Muslims, even Arab Muslims, but I have to wonder where they are.
Rather than make classy films about What a Billion Muslims Really Think, I would prefer to see Muslims, Arab and otherwise, hit the bricks demanding that the "violent one percent" be routed out and ostracized from civilized humanity.
Let us see the 99 percent of "peaceful" Muslims join their fellow citizens in condemning the likes of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan who was praised by Yemen-based cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who quickly declared Hasan a hero, as "fighting against the U.S. army is an Islamic duty."
To be fair, the Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the shooting; Salman al-Ouda, a dissident Saudi cleric and former inspiration to Osama bin Laden, condemned the shooting saying the incident would have bad consequences; translation: it could lead to a backlash against the 99% of "peaceful" Muslims who, save for the politically correct Council on American-Islamic Relations one-liner, stayed hidden behind closed doors - in shame or celebration, only those Muslims know.
In the end, I don't care WHAT a Gallup poll allegedly reports; I have little faith in Gallup and similar polls, anyway - have you ever been queried by a Gallup pollster or anyone else other than, perhaps, outside a voting booth?
I want to see American Muslims taking to the street in support of America and its freedoms, freedoms one hopes they came to enjoy rather than (try to) destroy.
Time is running out for the Muslims in the west to prove that they are, indeed, 99 percent in favor of peaceful coexistence with western mentality and civility.
I have a hard time believing that one billion Muslims want to live in peace, want to coexist without destroying the people who welcomed them into their countries. The online movie failed to convince me.
