Do American Muslims Support Terrorism?

Do American Muslims Support Terrorism?

Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans. By David Schanzer, Charles Kurzman, andEbrahim Moosa. Washington, D.C: U.S. Department of Justice, 2010. 61 pp. Free download.

Schanzer and Moosa of Duke University and Kurzman of the University of North Carolina have garnered a fair amount of media attention for their study despite its complete methodological failure. Anti-Terror Lessons asks some good questions in assessing the level of radicalization among American Muslims and identifying mechanisms to counter radical ideology. But the authors' approach to answering these questions evinces a lack of rigor that renders the report's conclusions untrustworthy.

The problems begin with a failure to define terms. A report about radicalization (a word that appears ninety -nine times in its pages) obviously must define that term; what constitutes radicalism is by no means self-evident. The authors' reliance on two contradictory datasets makes this problem even more acute.

One set consists of more than 120 interviews conducted in Buffalo, Houston, Seattle, and Raleigh-Durham to gather information on American Muslims' attitudes toward terrorism and their anti-radicalization efforts. The authors conclude from these interviews that "MuslimAmericans do not support terrorism directed at the United States or innocent civilians." They concede that "some of our interviewees were less quick to condemn other acts of violence outside the United States," but because the project was intended to focus on domestic terrorism, they "did not attempt to gauge the extent of this support or probe interviewees on these issues."

The other set includes data on American Muslims who since 9/11 have either perpetrated a terrorist act or have been sought, arrested, or convicted of a terrorism-related offense involving violence. However, the study's appendix of "Muslim- American Terrorism Offenders" includes the names of perpetrators whose acts related solely to violence outside the United States, such as the Lackawanna Six and twenty individuals involved in Somalia's Al-Shabaab recruiting network. The failure to probe interviewees on attitudes directly related to the data set on terrorist offenses amounts to sheer incoherence.

At times Anti-Terror Lessons reads more like an advocacy brief than academic research, drawing sweeping conclusions from insufficient...