A new survey that may be of interest

My favourite opinion polls are those which elicit enormous shock in the population for stating something everybody knew for ages, or could have guessed. Such as those headlined ‘People in Torquay are happier than people in Rotherham’ – goodness me, etc.

The polls that always occasion the gravest shock, however – despite the fact they come out every year or so – are those dealing with the views of the British Muslim community. In the lacunae between these reports their findings are completely ignored in favour of the approved set of lies with which the rest of the British population is fed to keep it amenable. Then another report comes out showing that lots of British Muslims support Hamas or something and we throw our hands up in despair, asking how can this be? We never knew! Perhaps this is why the BBC almost never covers such studies and just continues ignoring the issue.

There was an example of this doublethink recently, regarding the Henry Jackson Society’s (HJS) representative poll of 1,000 British Muslims. It showed that more than a third wished to see Sharia law introduced in our country, and suggested that fewer than a quarter of those polled believed Hamas had committed murder and rape in its incursion into Israel on 7 October last year. Quite what the huge majority believed Hamas had been up to instead – playing multi-faith Scrabble with their hosts? Sunbathing? – has not been revealed. The same poll discovered that nearly a third of British Muslims had a ‘positive’ view of Hamas and only 24 per cent a negative one. (They are a bit Marmite, aren’t they?)

And yet when I was on television talking about this poll, the presenter felt it necessary to assure the viewing public that actually ‘ordinary’ Muslims were totally opposed to terrorism and had no love for Hamas.