... and now 53% of Brits recognize the Islamic threat.
The alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners and last year's terrorist attacks on London have made more people fear Islam as a religion, not merely its extremist elements, a poll for The Daily Telegraph has found.A growing number of people fear that the country faces "a Muslim problem" and more than half of the respondents to the YouGov survey said that Islam posed a threat to Western liberal democracy. That compares with less than a third after the September 11 terrorist attacks on America five years ago. ...
The proportion of those who believe that "a large proportion of British Muslims feel no sense of loyalty to this country and are prepared to condone or even carry out acts of terrorism" has nearly doubled from 10 per cent a year ago to 18 per cent now.
The number who believe that "practically all British Muslims are peaceful, law-abiding citizens who deplore terrorist acts as much as any- one else" has fallen from 23 per cent in July last year to 16 per cent. However, there remains strong opposition to the security profiling of airline passengers based on their ethnicity or religion. ...
Most strikingly, there has been a substantial increase over the past five years in the numbers who appear to subscribe to a belief in a clash of civilisations. When YouGov asked in 2001 whether people felt threatened by Islam, as distinct from fundamentalist Islamists, only 32 per cent said they did. That figure has risen to 53 per cent.
Five years ago, a majority of two to one thought that Islam posed no threat, or only a negligible one, to democracy. Now, by a similar ratio, people think it is a serious threat.
I'd love to see a similar poll commissioned by our federal government, and I'd love to see the results. I'm impressed that the liberal Brits still have this much sense, and the next paragraph should serve as a reminder of why this nation once ruled the world.
The findings illustrate the huge task facing the Government's new ''cohesion and integration commission" which was formally launched yesterday, charged with finding out whether the multi-cultural experiment has failed and, if so, why.
Wait... they want to actually evaluate a government policy to see if it's working? Don't they know that's not how bureaucracies are supposed to work? Multiculturalism is tautologically good!
(HT: Larry Kudlow.)
Update:
Rod Liddle also writes about the death of multiculturalism (HT: Instapundit).
