Which Islam?

I hate seeing this kind of crap:

The new results come alongside increasingly critical public views of Islam: 49 percent of all Americans say they have generally unfavorable opinions of Islam, compared with 37 percent who say they have favorable ones. That's the most negative split on the question in Post-ABC polls dating to October 2001.

Morph into this kind of crap:

Clearly, not all opponents of the project feel unfavorably towards Islam. But two-thirds of them do. Does it mean that anti-Islam attitudes are the direct cause of opposition to the project? Impossible to say. But it's overwhelmingly clear that there's a link between the two sentiments, no matter how often opponents tell you the contrary.

The author of the second quote is Greg Sargent and note how he conflates "feel unfavorably" with anti-Islam. The two are not necessarily the same. I may disapprove of some aspect of Islam, but that does not mean I am anti-Islam or some kind of bigot. The problem with any of these polls is that I never see anyone try to define Islam as anything other than violent or non-violent toward non-Muslims, when Islam is not even close to that simplistic. If someone asked me the question, "Would you say you have a generally favorable or unfavorable opinion of Islam?", my response to them would be; Which Islam?

Are we talking about the version of Islam that kills homosexuals? Yeah, I gotta say unfavorable.

How about the Islam that stones to death anyone convicted of adultery? I'm not a big fan of adulterers, but I'm going to have to go with unfavorable there too.

Perhaps they are talking about the versions of Islam that, to one degree or another, treat women as second class citizens. Sorry, those are going to get an unfavorable too.

Oh, I know, are we talking about the Islam that wants Sharia to be the law of the land? You can kind of guess that one's going to be unfavorable too.

I could keep going, and that's kind of the point. There are so many things that average Americans might disapprove of, depending on whether they are practiced within any particular branch of Islam, that I'm surprised that the number of Americans feeling unfavorable towards Islam in general isn't closer to 80%. And an unfavorable opinion may remove Islam as someone's personal choice, but it does not necessarily translate into "anti-Islam" in general, nor bigotry against Muslims personally. It simply means that there are aspects to how Islam is practiced in this world that people do not like.

Is that a shock to any American who keeps up with the news?