All right, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
It's Chaos 92.7 in Austin.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're streaming live on the Internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And I'm really excited to bring on our next guest today.
It's John L. Esposito from the Gallup Poll.
And he is the co-author with Dahlia Mogahead, if I'm pronouncing that right, which I'm probably not.
Sorry, madam.
Of this excellent book, this most important book, seriously, absolute top of the list, Who Speaks for Islam?
What a Billion Muslims Really Think.
Welcome to the show, John.
Delighted to be with you.
Well, you know, I first heard of this book when Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, wrote a review of it and said, you absolutely have to read this book.
It's exactly what I've been trying to tell you all along.
And now here's the numbers that prove it.
Bottom line, the people in the Middle East, in the Muslim world, who support violence against America and Western interests, are no more likely to be Islamic fundamentalists than they are to be Islamic fundamentalists.
Is that the case?
Yeah, that's basically it.
All right.
Well, so tell us about this poll.
What did you do?
This wasn't just a few phone calls at dinner time.
You guys went all around the world and interviewed face-to-face thousands of people.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Basically, the Gallup organization has a world poll, which it started in 2007, and it polled about 95% of the countries of the world.
And within that was a poll of some 35 countries from North Africa to Southeast Asia, Muslim countries.
Now, what's interesting about this poll is it's the most comprehensive and systematic poll ever done.
It consists of ultimately around 50,000 one-on-one interviews, face-to-face, conducted in the local languages by people who live there in the different countries.
And the entire country is gridded so that you're talking to people not only in urban areas, but village and rural areas, different sexes, socioeconomic classes, different age groups.
And as a result, within plus or minus 3%, it represents the voices of a billion Muslims.
And what's gotten a lot of attention is that on a number of issues, it goes against the conventional wisdom.
Certainly the wisdom, let's say, I think that was a driver in terms of the Bush administration and many of its failed policies, as well as those who supported it.
Right.
I mean, there are members of the War Party.
I was actually in a debate not long ago where my opponent said that, well, there are a billion and a half Muslims in the world, and they did some poll of the governments in the Muslim world, and they said about 10% of their population are the problematic ones, the religious extremist types.
So there you go.
There are 150 million terrorists in the world that have to be killed, he said.
Well, it's brilliant.
I mean, number one, he won't have hard data.
Number two, if you're talking about many of the rulers in the Muslim world, you have to remember, many of the governments are authoritarian regimes, and authoritarian regimes brook no dissent.
And one of the things that they've especially done post-9-11, they did it before, but especially post-9-11, is to label any opposition within their country, any voice of opposition, whether mainstream or extremist, as basically extremist, as terrorist, etc.
Because what that enables them to do is, A, to continue to get support from the West, and B, to basically have, or at least they hope, a way of legitimating the repression that exists within their society.
What we wind up doing, in terms of our poll, is that obviously there are the terrorists out there.
We're looking, we look at the billion Muslims, we're obviously not interviewing the terrorists, because A, access is almost impossible, and B, the chances of anybody coming back home alive would be an issue.
I should point out also that I'm a Gallup senior scientist.
I don't work directly for Gallup, I'm a professor at Georgetown.
I'm sorry.
The reality of it is that we basically wanted to know, when you talk and look at the vast majority of Muslims in the world, what do they really think?
For example, are they blindly anti-Western?
Do the majority hate the West?
Are they anti-democracy?
How do they feel about women and women's rights?
What about the issue of violence?
And what we discovered was that 90-93% are what we call mainstream.
What does that mean?
The critical question is, do you think 9-11 was justified?
So about 90-93% say 9-11 is not justified, and follows pretty logically their answers on a lot of other questions.
7%, which is not a small number, 7%, roughly, would represent 91 million, are what we call potential radicals.
Now, potential radicals are not people who engage in violence, necessarily, but they are people who think 9-11 was justified.
But I think what's astonishing about the info that we got, at least astonishing to many people out there, is that really that's our target audience.
In other words, when you look at the potential radicals, they tend to be better educated, more internationally minded than the mainstream.
They do better financially.
They're more optimistic about their own life, but more pessimistic about the future of their country and their region.
They also tend to believe even more than the mainstream that democracy is the way forward, and that relations with the West are important.
But in contrast to the mainstream, they're far more cynical that that will ever happen.
And to a certain extent, the mainstream does too, but it's not as high a priority.
They believe that the West is really not interested in promoting democracy as self-determination.
What the West in general, America in particular, is promoting its brand of democracy to get its acceptable form of government.
And they fear more than the mainstream do.
They fear the intrusion, interference, invasion, or dominance by the West.
So I think that this becomes very important.
And if you want, later in the interview, we can talk about the whole question of anti-Westernism as well, how do Muslims feel about the West.
Well, let me make sure I understood you right there.
You're talking now about the 10% who answered that they thought the 9-11 attack was justified.
That same 10% are the ones that you say are interested in having democracy, are optimistic about their own lives, but more pessimistic about the future of their countries.
Is that right?
That's right.
It's 7%.
But that's right.
And that's why they're really the target audience, it seems to me, when we talk about winning the hearts and minds.
The terrorists are the terrorists.
So you're probably going to have to use, A, continue to use, obviously, military.
You want to capture, kill, or contain.
There can be some de-radicalizing of terrorists, but that's very difficult.
But the real question is, if you're fighting a war against global terrorism, and the whole notion behind winning the minds and hearts of what we call public diplomacy, is how do you prevent others from, let's say, turning to a more radical, violent path?
And so what we're saying is that not all of these 7% are at all necessarily going to turn to violence or radicalism, because many of them, as I just said, are well-established within their society.
But some of them can be, given their attitudes, either pushed positive or pushed into a far more negative, radical position, depending on how we handle the situation.
And one of the major findings of the book, and it's not just our data, if you read Robert Papp's, for example, study of suicide bombers across religions and cultures, which includes, obviously, the Muslim world, what Papp discovers is that the real primary driver are political grievances, particularly occupation, not religion.
Religion becomes a way to legitimate and to frame your struggle, you see, and mobilize people.
And that's what we find, that the real issue is not about a clash of civilizations.
It's about a clash of policies, of interests, in terms of broad-based anti-Americanism, as well as in terms of those who might become more radicalized.
Well, and I think the important, or at least one easy way to kind of get that point across, is when you look at American soldiers fighting on our side, for example, many of them pray before they go out on a mission, many of them are Christians, and yet that's not why they're there.
That's just, you know, it may be part of how they legitimize what they're doing to themselves or whatever, but why they're involved in these wars are for, like you said, political, human, earthly, political reasons.
That's right.
I mean, I think that, you know, broad-based, your analogy, for example, to soldiers in Iraq, or certainly, for example, during World War II or Korea, where, you know, you would have chaplains working with people, and one of the lines that would be used with those that were believers is, we're going to win because God's on our side.
In a lot of political struggles, if you're in a political struggle, and let's say you're fighting against what you consider to be a threat, oppression, injustice, and you're an atheist, well, you're going to fight against oppression, injustice, etc.
If you're a religious believer, you're going to fight for those same principles, but you're going to see those principles as rooted in your religion, and so you have an even stronger motivation and base for fighting.
But it's not as if your primary driver is really religion.
Now, it is true, what Muslim terrorists do in order to mobilize people is that they frame it religiously, and they will say that it's ultimately, you know, what God wants, but again, it's to legitimize.
You read the early speeches of Osama bin Laden, and you will see in his speeches, the first part of his speech deals with political grievances.
He's setting that out to attract a broad base of people in the Muslim world.
It's the second part of his speech when he goes to legitimate what he wants people to do, that is to engage in acts of violence and terror, where he then appeals to religion, because that puts him, if you will, quote, on the side of God.
Right, and yeah, that is absolutely the case if you look at the fatwas of 96 and 98 particularly.
Exactly.
Let's see, now I want to ask you this too.
The 10% who said that yes, they believe that the 9-11 attacks were justified, did you ask them, did you follow up and say, did you think that on September 12th, or do you only think that after the invasion of Iraq now when you're talking with them in 2004, 2005, or what?
Excuse me, that specific question was not asked, but what we did discover in our poll was that again, significant numbers, if not majorities, in many Muslim countries believed that the invasion of Iraq was counterproductive.
So going beyond the 7%, that in fact, majorities of Muslims across the Muslim world, whatever their particular position, believed were against that invasion.
Now, there were some exceptions country-wise, but in a majority of countries, that was the case.
The Iraq war is definitely seen, and it continues to be seen.
I travel in the region a good deal.
In fact, I came back from Iran last night, and in general, the Iraq war is seen, A, as being a clear indicator, along with the axis of evil approach, etc., of not simply being about going after terrorists, because the whole point was, this isn't about 9-11 going into Iraq, and at that time, not about Al-Qaeda, etc., because that was non-existent.
There was another agenda for that.
A, B, for many in the Arab and Muslim world, they look at the level of devastation, of both the destruction of the infrastructure, and even today, much of that infrastructure has not been rebuilt, let alone the untold number of people who have been victims, killed, or maimed, etc., and they don't see, if you will, a kind of positive scenario to this.
Very few people think that Saddam should have simply was a good guy, but the fact is, they look at it and, in effect, say, the real victims of that war were the Iraqi people, not so much Saddam Hussein.
I mean, I think we forget the incredible numbers of Iraqis who have been devastated by this war.
Oh, yeah, they certainly are left out.
You know, it's funny, it seems like the obvious kind of case.
I mean, what do you do after September 11th if you don't have a bunch of other agendas, if your purpose is to protect Americans?
I mean, obviously what you do is you try your best to get the bad guys who were responsible for it, and then the rest of the way, in the words of Philip Giraldi, the former CIA counterterrorism officer, you ramp this whole thing down.
You back off your support for dictators in the region.
You back off all your threats and calls for regime change.
You try to take a more even-handed approach in Palestine and attempt to prove to the world, even though kind of everybody would know it wasn't really true, but we could probably have gotten away with, after September 11th, saying, hey, listen, we're the good guys.
We never meant to be an empire.
We were only trying to protect you from the Russkies or whatever.
We're coming home now.
We're the good guys.
We're the defenders.
Osama is waging an offensive war here, not us.
And it seemed to me, October, November 2001, the people of the Middle East, the governments of the Middle East, the societies of the Middle East, they wanted to be our friends.
They looked at this, like Rice said, as an opportunity for us to all get closer together, not to turn against each other in this clash of civilizations.
I think that, you know, the sad part about it is that, I mean, it's very true.
On September 12th, for example, I received an e-mail from somebody in the Middle East who is both a kind of activist, professor, public intellectual, visible in the Arab media, studied both in Egypt and also in Britain, and is not particularly, you know, enamored with American foreign policy in many ways.
But, you know, she said, obviously, you know, what's happened is terrible.
You'll certainly want to go after Osama bin Laden, go into Afghanistan, but we wonder whether this is the beginning or the end.
Will this be an excuse for America to redraw the map of the Middle East?
And I think that what happened in the first Bush administration, although they backed away from it and tried to in the second Bush administration, under the influence of the neoconservatives who were, you know, very much in and architects of that administration, that, in fact, we precisely attempted to wage this, you know, to use the Osama bin Laden and global terrorism, not simply as something that we went after, but it then became an excuse for us to attempt to expand our influence and to restructure, as it were, the Middle East in a kind of to create a new American empire.
And I think that's what then winds up discrediting, you know, what we do in many parts of the Muslim world.
That is, where many in the Muslim world, mainstream as well as others, come to see the war not as a war simply against global terrorism, but a war against Islam in the Muslim world.
Because, you know, it's not seen as a war with a sharp focus on global terrorism.
It's seen as a war that attempts to use the threat of global terrorism as also an excuse for an even broader agenda.
Well, and, you know, of course, Osama bin Laden, as you said, tries to frame our political actions, our imperial position in that part of the world in terms of, see, they are crusaders at war against Islam.
And here are my ten concrete examples.
But he phrases it in the sense of a clash of civilizations.
And it seems like so many Americans have bought into that, mostly out of pure ignorance.
I mean, well, I don't know, maybe they're right.
Can you please tell me just how alien is Islam to Western culture?
Is it the case that we just can't coexist with these people on Earth?
I mean, it seems to be that there's at least some kind of percentage of the American people who think that, you know, rather than the Russians being the exact opposite of everything, you know, Western and true and good, it's actually Islam.
And people apparently really think that we've got to kill millions and millions and millions, subjugate them and make them understand that we're tough and they can never fight us, like Thomas Friedman says, burst that bubble, that they can dare to hurt us and get away with it.
That kind of attitude.
I'm sorry, I'm going off.
Answer the one question, really, what I want to understand is just how different is Islam from Judaism and Christianity that we have to feel like we're so separate from these people?
I think we have to recognize that, look, all religions have differences.
I mean, for example, there are significant differences between Judaism and Christianity, theologically, in a variety of ways, culturally.
But there's a lot shared in common.
And the same thing is true with Islam.
All three traditions share a belief in the one God, in prophets and revelation.
Muslims accept Moses and Jesus and their revelations as authentic.
But I think that, you know, for a lot of people, what they were keyed to was this notion after 9-11, which continues, you know, it's sort of like, first of all, the question is why do they hate us?
Well, the point is the terrorists hate us.
But they're a significant minority, a deadly minority, but the vast majority of Muslims, like significant numbers of people in Europe and all over the world, don't hate America, but hate many aspects of our foreign policy.
Now, when you actually ask Muslims globally, do you admire, what do you admire, what do you resent about the West?
Unlike Americans, who when asked what do you admire about Islam and Muslims, 57% say nothing or I don't know.
You don't find that among Muslims.
You do see resentments, which I'll touch on, but the first thing is when you say what do you admire, they will say our technology, they will say our work ethic, our freedoms, our rule of law, our transparency.
So a lot of the things that we associate with ourselves, you know, our economic drive, our democratization, et cetera, these things, many of these things are admired.
When asked what are the resentments, among the resentments are the fact that the West tends to denigrate Islam and view Arabs and Muslims as sort of second class, as not worthy of the same kinds of rights that we have.
In other words, what you see significant numbers of Muslims saying is we admire your principles and your values, but when it comes to, for example, democracy and human rights, but we think you have a double standard when it comes to our part of the world.
In fact, you have not been interested in promoting democracy.
This is interesting because during the first Bush administration, one of the things that they did that I praised them for was that they had a senior member of the administration who acknowledged that America, whether it was Democrats or Republicans in the presidency, whether Clinton or the first Bush term, the first part of the first Bush term, had not been interested in promoting democracy.
We practiced what Ambassador Haass called democratic exceptionalism when it came to the Muslim world.
And so that reflects very much the perception of many in the Arab and Muslim world.
And so when you then say, you know, talk about moving forward, what you find for improving relations is that majorities of Muslims, like majorities of Americans, believe in exchange, educational opportunities, but we tend to stop there.
For significant numbers of Muslims, one major factor is our foreign policy, and this shouldn't surprise us.
If we have a public diplomacy project, which we have, public diplomacy is not just about public relations.
If you're fighting to win the minds and hearts of people, it's not just, you know, what we say, it's what we do.
It's not so much what we stand for as whether or not we stand for that when it comes to people's perception of how American foreign policy plays out in their part of the world.
And so I think that, you know, the more Americans come to realize that, they'll realize that there is, in terms of the vast majority of Muslims, there's not only things that we share in common in terms of interest and values, but there are lots of opportunities to move forward.
Well, it sounds like you're addressing how much they really want to like us, but what is there about Islam and the Muslim world for Westerners to respect?
Well, I think that, I mean, there's a great deal.
The fact is, when you look at, you know, Muslims globally, in terms of values, you know, ironically, significant numbers, more than 50 percent of Americans, certainly, you know, more than 50 percent, let's say, even more than that, of Christians who have a more conservative approach when it comes to, let's say, you know, family values, the desire and emphasis on the fact that as citizens and as believers, one has an obligation to create a more just social society.
I mean, all of those things, you know, are there.
Again, I don't want to gloss over the fact that there are, you know, significant differences, but in terms of our basic religious values and beliefs, many of them are there.
I mean, Muslims, like Jews and Christians, believe not only in gods and prophets and revelation, they believe in moral accountability, moral responsibility.
They believe, in effect, the regulations for just war, i.e., under Islamic law, not followed by terrorists, I want to note.
Under Islamic law, war has to be proportionate.
It has to be declared by legitimate authorities.
You have to cease fighting when the enemy stops fighting.
Noncombatants are not to be touched.
All of those things that terrorists might engage in by way of saying these are exceptional times are not permitted in terms of mainstream Islam.
I think the problem most Americans have when they look at Islam, or when they look at the Muslim world, is that they see it through the lens, and it's understandable if you don't take the time to either engage Muslims or to read and know what's going on there.
They see it in terms of headline events.
And when you think about our media, our media ultimately deals with the explosive headline events.
That's what grabs news.
It's conflict.
It's conflict language.
It's confrontation that the media fields will draw the largest audiences.
That means that you're seeing the majority of people through the acts of a minority.
And, see, we say that what this data does is allow us to hear the silenced majority.
It's a majority that's often silenced by its government, but it's also a majority that is silenced because their voices are not heard.
And I think something for your listeners to realize, one of the common questions asked is, why haven't Muslims denounced 9-11 as terrorism?
The fact is, you can go up on the Internet, and in my writing, I give a lot of the websites, you will see statements, consistent statements, by major religious leaders and by many others denouncing terrorism.
Why don't we know about it?
Because the media doesn't find most of them very...
It's not great news.
It's not going to pull in a lot of people watching.
If you have an Osama bin Laden who makes a threat, he's immediately of interest to the media.
If you have a group of Muslim religious leaders that, for example, counter that threat, they won't be there.
If they're preachers of hate, yes, they'll be in the media.
Well, and in fact, the way I remember it, and I don't think I saw this on TV, but the way I remember it, Osama bin Laden actually, not long after September 11th, went to great lengths to try to explain why this was okay, because he was under very heavy fire from religious scholars throughout Sunni Islam, throughout the world.
Yeah.
And, yeah, that seems like an important news story there.
I agree.
Well, so what extent does race have to do with this?
Because, I mean, it seems, especially when you talk about images on TV, say, for example, American and Israeli flags being burned in the town square in Tehran somewhere, or something like that, how much of this is because we can't understand what they're saying.
They have brown skin and they wear funny hats and wear different looking clothes a lot of times, and they seem alien to Americans who don't know people who look like this.
Well, the great irony is that, I mean, first of all, Muslims come in all shapes and sizes and all races and languages.
Of course.
But there is a kind of stereotype that is out there, and I think that one of the risks that you have, I mean, for example, in this election, what many people will say is that the fact that Obama is African American, is black, that's not really as much of an issue as it has to do with the kind of problem that we now have in America with, quote, people who are brown, and that we associate with our immigrant problems, etc.
And certainly that's also a rising problem in Europe, to the extent that there's an anti-immigration attitude there, and you have significant numbers of Muslims, there is a bias, and a lot of it has to do with skin color.
And if you actually talk to even some American Muslims who've been born here, you know, who are professionals, etc., they will clearly have a sense that when they get profiled, it's because of the look of, you know, the fact that they, the color of their skin and certain kinds of features.
And I think that, of course, that gets reinforced when you think about our popular media.
If I, as an Italian American, remember growing up, and in the media, all of the gangsters, all the bad guys, were Italian or looked, quote, like Italian, you know, the sort of suave type.
And they were also seen as the people who were not only more violent in terms of your basic crime, but also even in terms of, let's say, being womanizers, or etc.
You know, post-9-11, you know, your shows are always dealing with, you know, Hakeem so-and-so, Muhammad this, etc.
And even when they don't use, quote, Muslim-sounding names, the bad guys tend to be, you know, portrayed as people who somehow play to a popular image of what a Muslim is like.
And that's why you'll have the funny thing where people will see a Muslim or meet a Muslim who doesn't fit that profile, and they're stunned.
You know, somebody who's very fair-skinned, who has blonde or red hair, or who is Caucasian.
And it's almost like, well, you're not a Muslim, are you?
I mean, you know, it's hard for them to believe that that's a Muslim.
Right.
Well, you know, if everybody would just watch Malcolm X, they don't even have to read the autobiography.
They could just watch the Spike Lee joint.
And this is the whole part of his autobiography shortly before he died, was he actually went to Mecca and did the pilgrimage.
And, wow, Muslims come in all different shapes and sizes and colors.
And so maybe this is not about race.
Maybe there's something else more important here to distinguish, you know?
Yeah.
I'm going to have to run, unfortunately.
I have another interview to do.
All right.
Well, you know, I was only going to ask you one more question about Robert Pate, but you already kind of brought him up and more or less answered it anyway.
So that's fine.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Great.
I enjoyed it.
You take care.
All right.
You too.
Bye-bye.
Thanks.
That's John L. Esposito.
The book is Who Speaks for Islam?
What a Billion Muslims Really Think.
