The letter to the Guardian cited a survey.
“Muslims deserve a better press than they have been given in the past decade.” And according to a recent ComRes poll, one in three people in Britain today believe that the media is responsible for “whipping up a climate of fear of Islam in the UK”.
The letter calls it a ComRes poll, but that’s just a brand name. What it really is is an Ahmadiyya Muslim Association survey, and to be exact, it’s an Ahmadiyya Muslim Association UK Islamophobia Survey. It’s not an impartial bit of research, it’s an agenda-driven poll.
The poll was commissioned by one of the UK’s oldest Muslim groups, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, in order to inform its plans to counter the tide of prejudice against Islam and highlight strategies to promote better community relations.
The poll comes on the eve of Britain’s biggest annual Islamic convention which will see 30,000 members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community gathering at a 220-acre site in Hampshire. Foremost on the agenda will be ways to build bridges between communities and spread the word that Islam means peace.
That’s an agenda. The Ahmadiyya Muslim Association (it’s amusing that ComRes slipped and called it the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community) plans to counter “the tide of prejudice against Islam” – which is to say, it plans to persuade people that Islam is good. That’s an agenda. It wants to “build bridges between communities” (it’s been following Stedman!) and “spread the word that Islam means peace” – which is to say, it wants to persuade people that Islam means peace when in fact it means submission. That’s an agenda.