worry about when it comes to understanding the scale of the
threat from Islam and the demographic changes of recent
decades. This problem with inaccurate survey results seems
to be a general trend in Western democracies which are no
longer the open societies they were just twenty or thirty
years ago. On top of this general failing in the reliability of
opinion polls on political matters, one must also factor in
that deception is sanctioned as a component of the religion
of war. As the old saying goes, in war the truth is the first
casualty. Why would this be any different when it comes
to a religion whose founder used deception in order to
attain his military and political ends?
In the first decade of the twenty-first century the
western media often talked-up some fatwa by an Islamic
scholar which supposedly condemns terrorism (the media
were far less ready to provide the public with references to
fatwas which support Islamic terrorism). Sometimes the
fatwa talked-up by the media might claim that Islam
opposes the taking of life from innocent people (this was the
language used in a fatwa from the Islamic Society of North
America in 2006).^264 As a senior academic researcher on
Islam noted about this fatwa:
it does not define the “terrorism” (a concept
not defined by Islamic law) that they
condemn. It refers, instead, to “civilians” – a
concept not recognized by the Islamic law of
jihad, and brands the terrorists as “criminals”,
which is a category of civil [i.e. secular], not
religious transgression.^265