Saturday, September 11, 2010

What values?

This morning the Ottawa Citizen reports Majority of Canadians say Muslims don't share their values.

The poll, conducted earlier this week by Léger Marketing in Canada and Caravan in the United States, found that 55 per cent of Canadian respondents and 50.3 per cent of Americans disagreed when asked whether "Muslims share our values."

This is such a breathtakingly stupid poll as to be laughable. What values are we talking about? When you broad-brush the question to that degree (i.e. lumping all “Muslim” values into a single question) you are going to get similar, if not more extreme results on just about any subject.

Ask mainstream Canadians if the “Conservative Party of Canada share our values” and you’ll get 70% or so who disagree.

Ask Canadians if the Bloc Quebecois shares their values, and you’ll get even higher disagreement numbers.

Finally, since the topic is religion, ask Canadians if the “fundamentalist Christian right share our values” and I’d be willing to wager the results would be very close to the question posed about Muslims.

No, this is nothing more than fear-mongering about those among us who may be different.

2 comments:

penlan said...

Excellent point! It's a stupid question, totally without value since values are not defined. I'm sure Muslims value their families as much as all people do, eg.

rww said...

If they consider someone of a different religion to have different values then of course you will get that result.

And how many of those answered no because "I believe in Jesus but Muslims don't" or because "Muslims believe in a different god than I do". Both of which are untrue of course. They believe in the same god as Christians and believe in Jesus. They just consider him to be a prophet rather than the son of god.