Investor’s Business Daily seems to think so:
The Pew Research Center just concluded an exhaustive scientific study of the size of the U.S. Muslim population. It was able to identify only 2.35 million Muslims — less than half the figure commonly cited by Muslim activists.
Pew, a liberal group with certainly no interest in marginalizing Islam, described its study as “perhaps the most rigorous effort to date to scientifically estimate the size of the Muslim American population.”
Yet it practically apologized for its more accurate reading, being that it came in “significantly below some commonly reported estimates frequently cited by Muslim groups.”
Foremost among such groups is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which claims to represent Muslims in Washington. CAIR commissioned its own survey in 2001 and came up with 6 million to 7 million, an estimate it always touts in its press releases and on its Web site.
As a result, most media outlets — as well as Congress, the White House and the State Department — have parroted the figure to describe the size of the nation’s Muslim population.
Politicians in Washington are intimidated by the figure, which CAIR uses as a cudgel to help advance its Islamist agenda. They believe it.
But it’s a wildly inflated guess manufactured by CAIR, something the media could have easily refuted all these years if they dared — simply by deconstructing CAIR’s unscientific methodology.
Until now, finding reliable data for Muslims in America has been hard because the Census Bureau does not survey creed. So CAIR’s fuzzy math went unchallenged, even though the “respected scholar” it hired to lead its “study” wasn’t a trained demographer. In fact, as a CAIR board member, he wasn’t even independent.
Yet another lie C.A.I.R. has been caught in, like the one about them not supporting terrorism, how many more before the government wakes up to the reality of what these people are really about?
Of course C.A.I.R. has also been less than honest about the size of its constituency. Some are saying that C.A.I.R has lost 90% of its membership over the past few years, but I think we should wonder if they made up those numbers too in an effort to get the governments ear, then when people started to ask too many questions, they lied yet again.
So who’s supporting C.A.I.R. now anyway? Maybe we should ask this guy.