ISIS has managed to attract some rather suggestible people into abandoning their existing life and fleeing to Syria to join up and fight for the cause, the term they use to describe this is “Hijra”. The observation that many have walked this road leaves you wondering just how much support they actually have, and so to answer that we need not guess, but can fall back upon some real data.
Pew Research published the results of a Poll on 17th Nov that summed up the results of a survey carried out within 11 countries with significant Muslim populations, and this is what they discovered …
Muslim populations, people from Nigeria to Jordan to Indonesia overwhelmingly expressed negative views of ISIS.
One exception was Pakistan, where a majority offered no definite opinion of ISIS.
Here is a visual summary of it all …
The rather obvious question that springs to mind would be to ponder over the specific beliefs of those that were polled. For example, were they all Muslim, or did they simply poll a random group from each of those nations?
It was the latter, and to give you some additional insights into the above here is a slightly more detailed breakdown …
There are concerns here within this ISIS poll …
- 9% in Pakistan indicated favourable and while 9% sounds small, we should not forget that the population of Pakistan is 182 million people and so 9% means that 16.38 Million people
- It is worse in Nigeria, there 14% gave them a favourable nod, and since the Nigerian population is 173 million then that adds up to 24.2 million.
And some weirdness as well …
- 7% of the Christians surveyed in Nigeria gave them a thumbs up …
- 6% of the Buddhists surveyed in Malaysia gave them a thumbs up …
… to which one can only think, “Are you F***ing kidding me, these guys would quite happily slaughter you and rape your wife because you are not Muslim, and you give them a thumbs up?”.
But overall It is a very positive result, and is great news
Overall, the vast majority of Muslims on the planet give ISIS a huge thumbs down …
In Lebanon, a victim of one of the most recent attacks, almost every person surveyed who gave an opinion had an unfavorable view of ISIS, including 99% with a very unfavorable opinion. Distaste toward ISIS was shared by Lebanese Sunni Muslims (98% unfavorable) and 100% of Shia Muslims and Lebanese Christians.
Israelis (97%) and Jordanians (94%) were also strongly opposed to ISIS as of spring 2015, including 91% of Israeli Arabs. And 84% in the Palestinian territories had a negative view of ISIS, both in the Gaza Strip (92%) and the West Bank (79%).
This is an important poll
The one thing that ISIS would love to see is for everybody to turn upon anybody who is Muslim, and so what this poll demonstrates is that the vast majority of Muslims on the planet do not support ISIS, but rather stand with us. We have all perhaps known that this is indeed true within our hearts, but here now is some solid data that confirms this to be a fact and not simply an opinion.