The 8-Million Muslim Lie

Since Muslim Keith Ellison's election to Congress, there's been a lot of noise in the media about the growing clout of the 8 million-Muslim electorate.

Eight million?

'There are 8 million Muslims in America now," boasted a spokeswoman for something called the Muslim Advancement Society. She appeared on CNN to talk about what a proud day it was for her and other Muslim-Americans to see a

Muslim brother sworn into Congress for the first time.

It seems the size of the Muslim population in America jumps by an additional million every other year or so.

Just a couple of years ago the consensus number bandied about in the media was 7 million. Before 9/11 it was 6 million.

Politicians in Washington are intimidated by the figure. They believe it.
But it's a wildly inflated estimate manufactured by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, something that the media could easily refute if they dared — simply by deconstructing CAIR's unscientific methodology.

While the number of Muslims is growing thanks to higher birthrates and immigration, it's nowhere near CAIR's claim. Even the most generous independent estimate puts it at half that size, or 4 million.

Finding reliable data for Muslims in America is hard because the Census Bureau does not survey creed. So CAIR, which has an agenda to Islamize America, has overfilled the vacuum.

To come up with its own figure, it hired a "respected scholar" by the name of Ihsan Bagby to lead its "study." But Bagby not only lacks independence — he's a CAIR board member — he's not even a trained demographer.

Worse, he admits the number he arrived at is a "guesstimation." Here's how he came up with it:

1. With help from CAIR researchers, Bagby called the nation's 1,209 mosques and interviewed 416 of them, asking them how many people were involved in their mosque in any way. The average response was 1,625, which is probably high, given that two imams claimed 50,000 when the nation's largest mosque — Dar al-Hijrah in the D.C. suburbs — has only about 3,000.

2. Bagby then multiplied that fuzzy participation figure by the 1,209 mosques and came up with 2 million "mosqued Muslims."

3. Next, he multiplied that sum by a magical factor of three to capture Muslims who might not participate in mosque activities, and arrived at the original 6 million guesstimate for the size of the Muslim population in America.
He says his factor of three was an educated guess. More like a wild exaggeration. Or perhaps a political calculation, as it produced a number that conveniently matched the size — and potential political clout — of the Jewish population in the country, also estimated at 6 million.

CAIR then took the liberty of bumping up the Muslim count to 7 million. Now — presto — it's at 8 million, and climbing.

"Today, 8 to 10 million Muslims live in the United States," claims Navy Lt. Cmdr. Abuhena Mohammed Saifulislam, who serves as Muslim chaplain for the new Marine mosque at Quantico, Va.

The Pentagon, which recently promoted Saifulislam, does not question the number. Neither does the White House, Congress nor the media — no matter how fantastic the number gets.
But it's the Wahhabi lobby's big lie. CAIR and other militant Muslim groups use it to intimidate politicians, corporations and media to change policy.

Eight-million-strong Muslims make the threat of bloc voting and boycotts a lot scarier. And the bigger the number, the bigger the foothold Islamists gain in American society.

But don't buy it. It's a total exaggeration.