I mentioned in my last post that I didn't know much about the state of terrorism in Indonesia, so I did a little web research.

The U.S. government reports the following Indonesian terrorist organizations:

• Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) - strength 200-500 members.
• Jemaah Islamiya (JI) - strength estimated hundreds to thousands.
• Kumpulan Mujahedin Malaysia (KMM) - strength unknown.

Bill Roggio, a counterterrorism expert I generally accept as factual, writes a little bit about the state of counterterrorism in Indonesia here: The State of the Jihad. It sounds to me like "the war on terror" is well underway and under control there.

The Counterterrorism Blog, another source I generally trust, has more information on Southeast Asia here: Two New Studies on Islamism in Southeast Asia. I haven't read those studies yet.

As for Michelle Malkin's post, I categorically do not trust her, considering that she is largely motivated by ad revenue and book sales and appearance fees (ie. money). So I will skip to her sources. Unfortunately, the main Yahoo headline she cites does not exist. (At least it doesn't at the time of this writing.)

However, following some of her links, I found this Reuters item from October 15, 2006: One in 10 Indonesia Muslims back violent jihad-poll. Obviously, if the humble reader has learned anything at all from my ramblings, he or she should know not to trust a mainstream media news report just on faith, so we'll need to dig into the article a little more. Also, the humble reader should also be aware that I never trust polls, and I generally think they are useful only as tools of propaganda.

The article states, "Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous country, with 220 million people, 85 percent of whom follow Islam..." According to those figures, with 1 in 10 Muslims supporting jihad, that would be about 18.7 million Indonesian Muslims supporting violent jihad, just like Michelle Malkin said.

Of course, the pollsters only spoke to 1,092 random Muslim men and women to make that conclusion, so we must put our faith in the fundamental polling principle that a small sample of people can accurately predict the behavior of a much larger group. In logical arguments, of course, that is an inductive fallacy, but we'll leave that aside for now.

This other Australian article on the same poll says, "About 9 per cent of Indonesians support the use of violent attacks such as the 2002 Bali bombings." So we've gone down from 10% down to 9% right there, and we also learn from this new article that the poll had a 3% margin of error, which means the real life percentage could be as low as 6% (or, admittedly, as high as 12%).

I'm unable to locate a web page for the Indonesian Survey Institute which actually performed the poll in question, or a link to the study itself, which I find a bit puzzling.

Fortunately, we don't have to rely completely on unreliable sources, because the Counterterrorism Blog chimed in on the poll, calling it "significant" and "discouraging." But unlike any media reports I've seen, Mr. Abuza pointed out a possible cause for the alarming amount of support for the Bali bombings: "But the Pew survey had one fascinating number that few analysts have latched onto: the number of Indonesians who believed their religion is “under attack” grew from 15 percent to over 80 percent. This is the key figure."

So in summary, I would call the poll disturbing and worthy of discussion, but the results are fairly understandable in light of the 80 percent of Indonesian Muslims who feel their religion is under attack. One can only imagine what people in American might support in a poll if they felt Christianity was "under attack." (Probably one need not imagine it, because one could probably do some Googling and actually find out, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.)

In any case, there's nothing here that would cause me to change my mind about whether or not Islam is inherently threatening.

Thomas Krehbiel writes The Krehbiel Strikes Back, a generally centrist commentary on news, media, politics, and culture.