What's 26% of seven million? (updated)

By Ed Lasky

Investor's Business Daily runs a terrific commentary on Muslim population statistics for America, which seem to be as exaggerated as the actual size of CAIR.

We've been told for years that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in America, and that the size of the Muslim population here has swelled to 6 million to 7 million. A new study pops that myth.

The Pew Research Center just concluded an exhaustive scientific study of the size of the U.S. Muslim population. It was able to identify only 2.35 million Muslims - less than half the figure commonly cited by Muslim activists.

Pew, a liberal group with certainly no interest in marginalizing Islam, described its study as "perhaps the most rigorous effort to date to scientifically estimate the size of the Muslim American population."

Yet it practically apologized for its more accurate reading, being that it came in "significantly below some commonly reported estimates frequently cited by Muslim groups."

Recall the New York Times has been a leading outlet for promoting the view that millions of Muslims are citizens of America. Here is one notorious example in an op-ed by a Muslim student at Harvard, widely ridiculed for its fatuousness and absurd claim regarding the Muslim population in America. Key quote,

"There in front of me, he stood for a part of America that has not made itself well known to 10 million Arab and Muslim-Americans, many of whom are becoming increasingly withdrawn and reclusive because of the everyday hostility they feel."

This is a common tactic among Muslim activists to create an impression that the Muslim vote is an important electorate that politicians should consider in their policies.

Update: James Arlandson writes:

To be more precise, Pew projects (scroll down to p. 9) that there are only 1.5 million Muslims who are eighteen years or older. The 2.35 million comprise every Muslim. So the voting block and influence have shrunk. (Pew qualifies its numbers by saying that they are only approximations.) Nevertheless, the numbers fall far short of the inflated totals. The donors to CAIR should take that low number into account before they contribute more money to this organization. They are not getting what they pay for.