Excerpt:
A federally-funded study of Muslim-American attitudes toward terrorism "reads more like an advocacy brief than academic research drawing sweeping conclusions from insufficient evidence," writes Daveed Gartenstein-Ross of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Writing in Middle East Quarterly, Gartenstein-Ross, director of FDD's Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization, points to serious flaws in Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans, a report by researchers at Duke and the University of North Carolina.
One problem is that study, funded by the Justice Department's National Institute of Justice, relies on contradictory sets of data. One consists of 120 interviews conducted in Houston, Buffalo, Raleigh-Durham and Seattle about American Muslims' anti-radicalization efforts and their attitudes about terrorism. Authors David Schanzer, Ebrahim Moosa, and Charles Kurzman concluded from those interviews that "Muslim-Americans do not support terrorism directed at the United States and innocent civilians."