"Some people think that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets are
justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies. Other people believe that, no matter what the
reason, this kind of violence is never justified. Do you personally feel that this kind of violence is
often justified to defend Islam, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?"[/qoute]

That was the specific question.

In response, within the past couple of years, Jordan,  Egypt, Pakistan, and Nigeria all had outright majorities responded that there are cases where it is justified to target civilians.

How someone can argue that the stats don't back up the claim that significant percentages of Muslims thinks it is okay to murder civilians to the name of Islam escapes me.

How about this: It is NEVER acceptable to murder an innocent in the name of your religion EVER. If the answer to the question is not "never" then that means you think there are cases where it is okay to deliberately target civilians.

I think the survey demonstrates the sickness of Islam as an ideology. We aren't dealing with a handful of fanatics, we are dealing with outright majorities of the Islamic population in many of these countries that can envision targeting bystanders with suicide bombers (like flying planes into the World Trade Center) as being an acceptable option.

The numbers absolutely support my statement, TOV. >50% supporting murdering civilians is a majority.

Tova, you need to boost your reading comprehension significantly.  You claimed just above that you had shown me to be wrong.

Here was the sub-header to the article: "Significant percentages of Muslims thinks it's okay to murder civilians in the name of Islam..."

My entire article is only two sentences long. 

Focus..... In a survey of a bunch of Islamic countries, significant percentages of the Muslim population (or outright majorities) think it is okay to target civilians to defend Islam.  That was what I posted. That is what the survey shows. I didn't write that all the countries were by majority. And it's also irrelevant whether Pakistan currently or last year had a majority that supported it. 

Let's review:

1. Islamic apologists claim that Terrorism is the result of a tiny extremist minority who have "hijacked their religion"
2. These terrorists use suicide bombings to target civilians in the name of "defending Islam".
3. Surveys of citizens in various Islamic countries show that significant percentages of the population and in some cases outright majorities actually do think it is justifiable to defend Islam by targeting civilians.

Therefore: Islam can hardly be claimed to be the "religion of peace" if significant percentages of its adherents believe it's okay to murder innocent people in its name.  A similar poll of Christians or Hindus or any other religion would not have had these results.  Even 36% of Muslims living in France think it's justifiable to target innocent civilians with suicide bombers in the name of Islam.  This is not a peaceful religion.

Since one assumes that the people who follow this religion are no more predetermined towards murderous violence than anyone else, what is the variable that makes millions of people think it is acceptable to hijack airplanes and crash them into buildings or blow up a shrapnel filled bomb in a cafe? Answer: Islam.

I think you have no credibility because you're an equivicator. You mistake a lack of decision making to being endless tolerance. You want to avoid having to make conclusions or take a stand at all costs. And that's your right. But in the meantime, other people will draw conclusions.

This article isn't about whether there are good parts of Islam. It isn't about what Islam's "real" agenda is. It isn't even about whether the Arabic world which happened to be Muslim at the time invented Algebra (In grown-up countries, we don't give credit for inventions to religions, we give them to people or countries).

This article is simply pointing out the results of a survey: Signfiicant percentages of Muslims think it is justifiable to target civilians (with suicide bombers and such) to "defend" Islam.  That's it.

When the adults of the world had to go and defeat Nazism, I am sure there were warm fuzzy people arguing that there were nice Nazis. I wonder if a survey of Nazis in Germany would have had double digit "Yes" answers to targeting civilians to defend Nazism. And hey, Hitler was nice to animals and a vegetarian.

But you know what? It doesn't matter. What they DO matters. And the facts are, Muslims have been going around for decades now murdering innocent people in the name of their religion and weak equivicators have tried to make excuses and argued that it's only a tiny fringe group that thinks this way. Now we have a survey that shows, no, it's not a tiny fringe group. It's millions and millions of Muslims who feel this way.

TARGETS civilians. No, in the Cold War the US military did not intentionally target civilians.  And civilians weren't killed over a belief, even accidentally. 

Let's be clear here: The survey was about TARGETING civilians as in suicide bombers and the like. They are trying to murder civilians.  Civilians aren't a means to an end in the attack, they are the goal. 

Muslims aren't killing civilians in the process of some other tangible objective. I.e. they aren't attacking a war production factory and some civilians happened to be killed. The civilians are the TARGET. This has been stated over and over again.

Please, by all means, explain how murdering civilians was the goal of the United States in any war. Even Hiroshima in World War II was not targeting civilians but its warp making capacity (a number of cities in Japan were not bombed in World War II such as Kyoto because of the lack of military value in doing so).

Do you understand the distinction:  Flying a hijacked plane into the Pentagon is one thing. Civilians died but they were attacking a military target. Flying a hijacked plane into the WTC is a whole different matter.

But let's carry out the "evil US" to its logical conclusion:

Then why doesn't the United States simply incinerate every man, woman, and child in Iraq and the rest of the middle east? We have the capability. There is no one who could stop the United States from doing it.  If the US is "no better" then why not?  

Do you think you could get more than a single digit percentage of Americans to agree that it would be justifiable to annihilate the middle east to "defend democracy"?  If Iran invaded democratic Iraq, should we exterminate Iran?  If we are no better, why shouldn't we?

The moral equivalence stuff gets really old here.  Here we have it in black and white that millions of Muslims think it is justified to intentionally go out and murder civilians with suicide bombers and the like -- attacks like 9/11 and what do we get? That this is no different than civilians who happen lose their lives in a struggle between opposing military forces?