Citizen Warrior:

FRANCE: Several polls show that more than 70% of the French think Islam is incompatible with democracy and Western civilization. Those polls predate the Charlie Hebdo attack (source).

AUSTRALIA: One in four Australians holds a negative attitude towards Muslims, a national survey has found. It found people were five times more likely to hold negative attitudes towards Muslims than any other religious group. “What we’re finding is negativity towards Muslims is five times higher than towards Christians and Buddhists, so there’s quite a significant issue there,” said Professor Markus (source).

AUSTRIA: A new survey carried out in December and published on Saturday by Der Standard newspaper shows that 51 percent of the respondents say that Islam is a threat to Austrian society (source).

BRITAIN: More than a quarter of young adults in Britain mistrust Muslims, a BBC survey shows. Some 27% of the thousand 18 to 24-year-olds questioned said they did not trust them, while fewer than three in 10 (29%) thought Muslims were doing enough to tackle extremism in their communities. A similar proportion of the young people polled (28%) said the country would be better off with fewer Muslims and almost half (44%) felt Muslims did not share the same values as everyone else (source).

GERMANY: A majority of Germans have rejected former President Christian Wulff’s famous statement that “Islam is now also a part of Germany”, with 52 percent against the idea (source).

CZECH REPUBLIC: About two-thirds of Czechs who have used the European election calculator EUvox consider Islam a threat to Czech society, according to an analysis of the results carried out by the Academy of Sciences Sociological Institute, released today. The institute assessed the opinions of 18,000 Czechs (source).

NETHERLANDS: Half of all Dutch people agree with Geert Wilders’ opinion that there should be fewer Moroccans in the country. De Hond polled 2500 people, 43 percent of whom expressed that they would rather there be fewer Moroccan people in the Netherlands. Only 3 percent of the people want there to be more Moroccans (source).

DENMARK: A Gallup poll shows most Danes think too many concessions are made for the minority. The public debates over banned Christmas trees, halal meat at schools and cashiers wearing headscarves appear to have made the Danish population more wary about giving their Muslim neighbors cultural concessions (source).

UNITED STATES: A Zogby Analytics poll found a growing number of Americans doubt that Muslim-Americans would be able to perform in a government post without their religion affecting their work. Forty-two percent of respondents felt that Muslim-Americans would be influenced by religion (source).

CANADA: Polls by Angus Reid, a public opinion research firm, show a steady increase in anti-Muslim sentiment since 2009, higher than any of the other major religions. Last year, 54 percent of English-speaking Canadians viewed Islam unfavorably, a feeling that stands even higher, at 69 percent, in the country’s French-speaking region, Quebec (source).

ITALY: At least half of those surveyed in Italy say they have a negative opinion of the Muslims who live in their country (source).

GREECE: Fifty-three percent of those surveyed in Greece have a negative opinion of the Muslims who live in their country (source).

SCOTLAND: A school in Glasgow, Scotland asked pupils to say which which words came to mind when people talked about Muslims. Their responses included “terrorist,” “oppressed,” “a threat” and “scary” (source).

BRITAIN: More than half the British public think that Muslim women SHOULD NOT be allowed to wear the niqab in public. An opinion poll for Channel 4 found that 56% of respondents said they opposed the wearing of the full face-veil, while 55% said they would support a national ban, similar to legislation that was passed in France in 2010. The poll found that three-quarters (76%) said they were unsure of how to relate to women wearing the full face veil, while more than half (56%) thought it was demeaning to women who wear it (source).

GERMANY: The Bertelsman Foundation think tank survey looked at the perception of Islam in Germany from the eyes of Muslims and non-Muslims. Of the non-Muslims surveyed, 57 percent thought that Islam was threatening or very threatening to German society. The survey was carried out in November, before the massacre of journalists in Paris (source). According to a study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 56 percent of Germans consider Islam to be an “archaic religion, incapable of fitting into modern life” and many believe religious freedom for Muslims should be “substantially restricted” (source).

UNITED STATES: A Pew Research Center survey found that 82% of American Republicans are “very concerned” about the rise of Islamic extremism in the world, compared with 60% of political independents and 51% of Democrats. Similarly, two-thirds of Republicans (67%) say that Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence among its believers, compared with 47% of independents and 42% of Democrats (source).

Update 1/4/15 – John Hayward at Breitbart has this analysis:

POLLS: WEST ILL-AT-EASE WITH MUSLIMS LIVING IN ITS MIDST

Polls from Italy and Germany showing that roughly half of respondents said they “have a negative opinion of the Muslims who live in their country.”

A wide variety of negative opinions are captured in these polls, which represent a considerable spectrum of survey methods and sample sizes.  Just to contrast the first two results cited, 70 percent of the French believing that “Islam is incompatible with democracy and Western civilization” is a lot more severe than 25 percent of Australians holding a “negative attitude toward Muslims.”

One of the news items collected by Citizen Warrior concerns an unspecified number of pupils at a Scottish school in 2013 using negative terms like “scary” when asked to write down their thoughts about Muslims; this earned them a visit from hijab-wearing women from a Muslim women’s resource center, who had an evidently amiable chat with the kids that included a few odd digressions, such as comparing the hijab to headscarves worn by Mother Theresa and the Queen.  That doesn’t seem like an item that belongs on the same shelf as 57 percent of Germans telling a pollster they regard Islam as “threatening or very threatening to German society.”

There’s also the question of conflating Islam with Islamism, the point at which nearly every discussion of Islam, by everyone from the most affectionate devotee of the religion to the most hostile outsider, runs into trouble.  The most severe critics wonder if there’s a real difference between Islamic theology and its political application at all, judging it to be a political faith that draws no line between secular and religious law.  We’ve all heard the case from the other side of the spectrum that Islam’s problems are the work of a “tiny minority of extremists” who don’t understand their own professed religion.  Some of the news items in Citizen Warrior’s roundup explicitly concern Islamism or “Islamic extremism,” while others are broader expressions of unease with Islam at large.

Everyone desires clarity and honesty in a discussion of this importance.  Muslims who feel they are unfairly viewed with hostility or suspicion blame an incomplete or incorrect understanding of their faith by outsiders, deeply resenting the assumption that every mosque is sympathetic to terrorism.  As several items in the list above illustrate, including the one from Scotland, the common reaction to strongly negative opinions of Islam is a call for more education and outreach.  It is a common Western assumption that bad feelings about any group are largely a product of ignorance, while understanding breeds tolerance.

This desire for clarity should be universal: Western cultural and political elites should make the effort to understand people who are uncomfortable with Islam, too.  Dismissing them as benighted bigots is itself an act of bigotry.  It’s uncomfortable to talk about the real reasons so many outsiders are suspicious of Islam, but a truly tolerant society must be illuminated by courage.  A great deal of what Western elites say to mollify (or, more commonly, intimidate) critics of Islam is laughably simplistic or obviously untrue.  We are expected to beat around some very large bushes, and ignore formidable elephants standing in the middle of the room.