WASHINGTON: Seven months after the Sept 11 attacks triggered incidents of harassment against them, US Muslims reported being unhappy with parts of President George W. Bush’s ‘anti-terrorism’ plan but well treated by their neighbours, a recent survey found.

While only one-third of respondents said they were convinced that Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network was responsible for the attacks, slightly more than half believed that the US military campaign in Afghanistan was justified, according to a poll of more than 500 randomly selected Muslims interviewed late last month.

But nearly two-thirds who responded described the widespread questioning and detention of Muslims in the US after Sept 11 as “an unwarranted abuse of civil liberties”.

And 75 per cent said they “strongly agreed” that “the US has always sided with the Israelis against the Palestinians”, while 60 per cent rejected the notion that the Bush administration “is trying to bring about a fair peace” between the two sides.

According to the poll, released here on Thursday by Hamilton College and Zogby International, nearly three out of every four Muslim Americans either know someone who has or have themselves been subjected to discrimination, harassment, or physical assault since Sept 11.

“It is clear from this poll that reports in recent months of anti-Muslim discrimination, harassment or attacks have not been exaggerated,” said Dennis Gilbert, a sociology teacher at Hamilton. The polls showed a “clear escalation” in such incidents after Sept 11, compared to the preceding period, he added.

The poll results mostly echo findings of a larger poll of Muslim opinion conducted by Zogby for Project Muslims in American Public Square (MAPS) at Georgetown University last December. It found that 51 per cent of Muslims supported the campaign in Afghanistan, and 58 per cent had personally suffered or knew someone who had suffered a backlash experience since the attacks.

Half of the Muslim respondents defended US military action in Afghanistan as justified although 43 per cent disagreed with that assessment, a finding that is strikingly consistent with the December survey.

Despite their experiences after Sept 11, 70 per cent of the respondents described their fellow non-Muslim citizens as either “friendly” or at least “neutral” toward Muslims. The same percentage reported that non-Muslims had “personally conveyed support” for them after the attacks.

Interestingly, opinions on US support for Israel differ only slightly from those found in a general public opinion poll take in early May by the University of Maryland. It found that two thirds of Americans favoured a strictly neutral approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but almost 60 per cent said that the Bush administration took Israel’s side.

Almost half of the respondents (47 per cent) in the Hamilton/Zogby survey said they agreed that the United States should try to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, a finding that should cheer anti-Saddam hawks in Bush’s administration.

The number of Muslims living in the United States is a source of controversy, particularly between the Muslim and Jewish communities, which both vie for the status as the most popular religious group in the country after Christianity. Because of the division between church and state in the US, the census does not include religious data.

While most analysts agree there are about six million US Jews, estimates of the number of Muslims range from about two million on the low end to seven million on the high end. Zahid Bukhari, director of the MAPS project, said he believed the best estimate was between five and six million.

Respondents of the Hamilton/Zogby poll were identified by Muslim-looking names in telephone directories and were asked to confirm whether they were indeed Muslim.

Of those identified in this way, 30 per cent said they were native-born, one-third were born in an Arab country, 16 per cent in Pakistan, and the rest somewhere else. Ninety per cent of respondents said they were US citizens.

When asked to identify themselves by race or ethnicity, 17 per cent described themselves as white; eight per cent as African American; 2.6 per cent as African; 29 per cent as Arab, and 31 per cent as Asian.

But those differences were not reflected in the poll results, suggesting a political coherence among US Muslims.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.