Anotha WTF moment

Preety Aroon, in her Foreign Policy blog entry called "Are you OK with bombing civilians?" wrote something interesting. I'm just going to copy her text and hope that she doesn't sue me.

Recently, a survey by the Pew Research Center (pdf) asked Muslim Americans:
Some people think that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets are justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies. Other people believe that, no matter what the reason, this kind of violence is never justified. Do you personally feel that this kind of violence is often justified to defend Islam, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?
The responses were:
often or sometimes- 8% (15% for those ages 18-29)
rarely- 5% (11% for those ages 18-29)
never- 78% (69% for those ages 18-29)
The remainder said "don't know."
Any statistician will tell you that you have to be cautious in comparing the results of two separate polls, but at the very least, the results above show that when it comes to intentionally attacking civilians, Muslim Americans don't support it any more than Americans at large do.
In my blog post yesterday, I said it was "unsettling" that "one in four young U.S. Muslims suveyed agreed that suicide bombing of civilians was at times acceptable." Well, now I also find it unsettling that 51 percent of my fellow Americans think it's acceptable
to intentionally attack civilians. It's not too surprising, however. Many Americans think that dropping nuclear bombs on Japanese civilians during World War II was acceptable, so it makes sense that a sizable fraction think—at least on certain occasions—that bombing civilians is justifiable. Troubling indeed.