- Almost a decade after the Policy Exchange survey of Muslim attitudes in
the UK, a television channel commissioned a new survey, as part of a
programme about the failures of multiculturalism and the divergence
between the attitudes of Muslims and the rest of the country. “C4 Survey
and Documentary reveals What British Muslims Really Think”, Channel
4 , 11 April 2016, http://www.channel4.com/info/press/news/c4-survey-
and-documentary-reveals-what-british-muslims-really-think/. When one
considers the context in which this survey was commissioned, then one
would expect the people involved to be aware of the high number of
Muslims in the 2007 Policy Exchange survey who wanted homosexuality
criminalised. The 2007 survey showed that, in aggregate, 61% of
Muslims wanted homosexuality criminalised, but that 2007 survey also
showed that young adult Muslims were extremely antigay. In the 2016
survey the proportion of Muslims who wanted to criminalise
homosexuals fell to 52%, rather then going above 61% as one might
expect based on the 2007 survey (71% of 2007 survey in the 16-24 age
bracket wanted gays criminalized). This unexpected divergence from the
2007 survey receives no mention in the 2016 C4/ICM survey, nor the
trend shown in that 2007 survey; thus no explanation is offered in the
later survey as to why there is this discrepancy from 2007. A Gallup
survey from 2009 showed that 99.5% of UK Muslims admitted they had
no tolerance of homosexuality (see “Muslims in Britain Have Zero
Tolerance of Homosexuality, Says Poll”, The Guardian, 7 May 2009,
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/may/07/muslims-britain-france-
germany-homosexuality.) Having no tolerance would not necessarily
equate to wanting to see gays criminalized (and possibly killed), but the
2016 survey is also widely discrepant with this 2009 survey. It seems
highly likely that, as shocking as the general public seemed to find the
C4/ICM poll, the true scale of Muslim hatred of homosexuals is far
higher than the news headlines from 2016 would lead one to believe. ↵
dana p.
(Dana P.)
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