julie......ISLAM, the fastest growing religion in US? ...think again..

Submitted by Joe Schmoe USA (United States), May 26, 2007 at 02:18

CAIR's Fuzzy Math

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 5/23/2007

Politics And Demographics: We've been told for years that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in America, and that the size of the Muslim population here has swelled to 6 million to 7 million. A new study pops that myth.

The Pew Research Center just concluded an exhaustive scientific study of the size of the U.S. Muslim population. It was able to identify only 2.35 million Muslims — less than half the figure commonly cited by Muslim activists.

Pew, a liberal group with certainly no interest in marginalizing Islam, described its study as "perhaps the most rigorous effort to date to scientifically estimate the size of the Muslim American population."

Yet it practically apologized for its more accurate reading, being that it came in "significantly below some commonly reported estimates frequently cited by Muslim groups."

Foremost among such groups is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which claims to represent Muslims in Washington. CAIR commissioned its own survey in 2001 and came up with 6 million to 7 million, an estimate it always touts in its press releases and on its Web site.

As a result, most media outlets — as well as Congress, the White House and the State Department — have parroted the figure to describe the size of the nation's Muslim population.

Politicians in Washington are intimidated by the figure, which CAIR uses as a cudgel to help advance its Islamist agenda. They believe it.

But it's a wildly inflated guess manufactured by CAIR, something the media could have easily refuted all these years if they dared — simply by deconstructing CAIR's unscientific methodology.

Until now, finding reliable data for Muslims in America has been hard because the Census Bureau does not survey creed. So CAIR's fuzzy math went unchallenged, even though the "respected scholar" it hired to lead its "study" wasn't a trained demographer. In fact, as a CAIR board member, he wasn't even independent.

Worse, the Muslim professor admitted the number he arrived at for CAIR was a "guesstimation" that magically and conveniently matched the size — and potential political clout — of the Jewish population in the country, also estimated at 6 million.

It's telling that CAIR did not link to the Pew study or any press coverage of it on its Web site. CAIR derives its power from the size of its potential membership. The bigger it is, the more clout it has in Washington and the corporate boardroom.

Until now, the perception was that CAIR spoke for several million Muslims and could rally them to boycott a company or to vote as a bloc to swing an election if it didn't get its way. Officials feared the group because they thought it could marshal an Islamic juggernaut. The threat alone has caused many to back down from criticism or policies CAIR didn't like.

But it was the Wahhabi lobby's big lie. CAIR couldn't deliver even 2 million voters if it tried. According to Pew, just 1.5 million Muslims are of voting age.

There is no big Muslim lobby, just CAIR's big, hollow PR machine.

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