 maybe less, so you really have to take your seats. Good afternoon, good morning, good afternoon. My name is Mark Schmidt. I'm the Director of the Political Reform Program here at New America and had the privilege of working with Bobby McKenzie for the last year or so as this project and others have developed, which has been a real privilege and a pleasure. And I just want to just start off by welcoming all of you to New America for this really important discussion of American attitudes about Muslims, both nationally and across a number of metro areas that I've learned a lot from just looking at the data, and I think we'll learn a lot more from the discussion that follows. So I just want to start off first by obviously thanking Bobby for organizing this, and you'll hear more from them. I want to particularly thank the American Muslim Institution for their collaboration on the project, and particularly Ambassador Aslam Siddiqui, Dr. Rahman, who's the Chair of the Board of the American Muslim Institution, and Shafiq Khan, who's also on the board of AMI. So it's been a great partnership here, and I also want to thank, I know there are other board members and guests of AMI, and I want to thank you all for coming and being a part of this project. When Bobby asked me to do this, I said, you know, okay, it's an interesting fit with the kind of work that the political reform program does, and I thought about it more. And thinking about it yesterday, a young political scientist who works a lot with our program and who's presented here as well, named Alex Hotel Fernandez, had an op-ed in the Times based on a study that he and some colleagues had done that was about just how much, how little really, for example, congressional staffers knew about public opinion about key issues, issues regarding immigration, climate change, and so forth. And there was a real gulf between what they thought public attitudes were and what public attitudes really are. And it was really a reminder to me, as a former congressional staffer, that this, we make a lot of assumptions, we make a lot of assumptions obviously about people, and we know that, but we also make a lot of assumptions about people's attitudes about issues and other people. And it's very, very difficult to really get at the real structure of public opinion and how you can work with it. And you know, there's an old phrase in community organizing, you kind of have to meet people where they are and understanding where people are when they think about Muslim Americans and whether it's people they've actually had contact with or people they imagine is really important and subtle. And I think this survey is a huge step forward to people who want to really understand what attitudes really are and where attitudes might be able to be changed or not and begin to have a much more productive conversation that leads to better understanding, really addresses fear, misinformation, and hate, particularly in the light of recent events, but not bound by the news because we're talking about, we're talking about a long future of learning to live in one diverse, complex country with a lot of, where a lot of traditions come together in the most remarkable and important way. So really think this is a wonderful contribution. I'm really glad that New American can be a part of it and I look forward to learning more as the event goes forward. So actually I think I'm turning it over now to Ambassador Siddiqui, right, to get things started. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, everyone, for being here. As-salamu alaykum, Muslim Peace of Greening to all of you. It's a pleasure for me to be here, to be speaking to this August group. On behalf of the American Muslim Institution, I also would like to extend welcome to all of you, especially to our interfaith partners who are here in the room, and also Muslim community leaders from Virginia, Maryland and Washington D.C. On a fine day and also working day to be seeing this many people, I especially thank you for taking time from your busy schedule to be here. Both Bobby and I are honored and overwhelmed by the number of people who have showed up here this afternoon. It shows that you care on the topic. We are about to launch this survey, the results with you and share with you. At this point, I'd like to also have a point of privilege to introduce our Chairman, Dr. Akil Rahman and a couple of board members also. Qaisa Sharif, Shafiq Khan. Do I see Dr. Algawari in the back of the room? Thank you for being here. And I especially like to recognize our Executive Director of AMI, Shahid Rahman, who has done a great job in working with Bobby on this project. Shahid, please take time. Since New America needs no introduction, allow me to briefly talk about and introduce what is AMI or American Muslim Institution. We are a nonpartisan, non-profit 501C organization based in Washington D.C. since 2015. We are relatively very new and young. We believe in building greater understanding between American Muslims and fellow Americans by working together to create a more just inclusive and harmonious society that upholds our constitutional values. And also our mission is to galvanize the American Muslim community to engage with their neighbors in order to get to know each other and also highlight the contributions Muslims make to America. Also to establish a greater dialogue and regular dialogue proactively with other elected leaders, our congressmen, senators and appointed leaders, interfaith community and religions of different faiths in America, as well as the media. Our decision to partner with this study with New America, this nationwide survey was based on our belief that American Muslims need to know how we are being perceived by fellow Americans. And also, that's not the end of it. Also, how we can change those perceptions from negative to positive. Just question, I will raise two questions, was how many Americans know that about 10 percent of all medical doctors in America about 25,000 are Muslims faith? Also, not very many people know that more than 16,000 Muslim Americans are serving in our armed forces and we are all proud Americans and this is what we are shoulder the same responsibility in defending this nation. AMI believes that all this which is happening since 9-11 in pro-activist nature and activism which has come among Muslims, more than 100 candidates reign this year for different offices in the U.S., all across the U.S. But we need to do a better job in terms of reaching out to our neighbors and decision makers, policy makers and the media in terms of reaching out to explain what are American Muslim values so that they know that American values are also Muslim values. In closing, I would like to thank Bobby McKenzie and the New America team for partnering with us and we look for better active and proactive collaboration in the future. Also, I would like to recognize some of the slumming centers who were generously helped with us in terms of funding this study and I'd like to name them. If you happen to be here, please stand up. McLean Islamic Center, Muslim Association Virginia, Darul Hijra, Islamic Center of Maryland, ICM, Alhazard Blue Mosque. Thank you. And there are several donors and this up to them they understand but I think there are several generous donors who contributed to this project without their help would not have been able to fund this study so I thank them now all. So thank you and at this time it's my honor to welcome Bobby to the podium. Thank you. Thank you Ambassador. My name is Bobby McKenzie. I'm a director and senior fellow here at New America and in April 2016 I founded the Muslim Diaspora Initiative and I founded this initiative after spending nearly 15 years working in and on North Africa and the Middle East and large part because I thought there was a real need for scholarship and data to better understand what Muslim communities look like in the U.S. And so I'm working on two broad issues. One looks at the impact and contributions of Muslims at the local level. So what do the communities look like? What kinds of activities are they involved in? So for example in Houston there is a vibrant Hispanic Muslim community. There is a West African Muslim community an Indian and Pakistani community and so on and very few people know about the differences with these communities but as I was traveling across the country talking to community members and telling them about this work one of the things I kept hearing and this was during the presidential election cycles we think this is great to highlight the positives but we're worried that there are a lot of negatives that are happening that people don't know about and people started to give examples of a woman's veil being pulled off a kid being bullied in school, discrimination in the workplace and I heard this and the researcher in me thought maybe but maybe it feels like it's worse than it is because maybe people are sharing the same instance on social media which is an echo chamber and that coupled with comments from people like Chris Christie who said he wouldn't take in a five year old orphan from Syria suggesting there's something wrong with Muslims may have amplified things and so I pulled together a set of researchers and we began to go through looking at six different categories looking at anti-Muslim activities and we went back to 2012 and we've collected nearly 800 incidents and I'm sure that the situation is quite bad at the state and local level and so I offered that because I just wanted to echo Mark's important words about we need to understand what's happening we need scholarship and data because this is how you actually move the needle and so with that I began talking with AMI Ambassador Siddiqui, Dr. Haman, Shafiq Khan Dr. or excuse me, Shahid Rahman about how to advance this sort of research and we together over the summer decided on commissioning a national survey to look at public opinions of Muslims and so the idea was to run the survey in the lead up to the midterms and we wanted to run this as late as possible in the midterms and why? Because that's a period when Muslims at the local, state and federal level in many elections are front and center and often times not in a positive way and so we ran the survey and it went from October 2016 to October 2021 so it was just before the caravan was front and center on TV and just before we started to hear about Middle Easterners to use that quote in the caravan so it would not have captured that but let me just show you what we did here so we, 1,765 interviews were conducted of those 1,165 were national and then there were additionally 620 interviews that were oversamplings of 4 areas the DMV area, Houston, Orlando and Tampa and we did the oversamplings because we wanted to get a sense of are there differences in different cities for today's presentation I'm going to talk about the national findings compared with the DMV area so the good news is that Americans are largely accepting of Muslim Americans nearly all non-Muslim Americans agree that diversity is a good thing for America and I should state one thing here we only surveyed non-Muslims so one of the first questions in the survey asks about religion if somebody self-identifies as Muslim we thank them for their time and say we wish you well so this survey is based on non-Muslim respondents so nearly 85% of respondents agree that diversity is a good thing a similar majority believe that their fellow Muslims contribute to the US economy and society and two thirds also agree that it's a positive sign of progress for our country to have over 100 Muslim Americans run for political office so these are all really positive signs but if you contrast that with some of the other responses only about half of non-Muslim Americans believe Islam is comparable with American values okay? so just to think about this to compare that again 85% of respondents believe that diversity is a good thing for America but only 56% of Americans believe that Islam is compatible with American values and it's equally interesting and troubling to see that 60% only 60% of respondents think that Muslim Americans are as patriotic as other Americans where we saw most of the fear though or concerns I should say looked at essentially three areas one is extremism spreading within Muslim communities 56% of respondents registered concern one in three respondents said that they feel uncomfortable when they see a Muslim wearing a veil or a traditional Islamic attire one in three respondents said that they would be concerned about a mosque or Islamic center being built in their neighborhood one in three respondents said that they think Muslim Americans should receive extra security screening at the airport political ideology was the strongest indicator of negative attitudes and just to do some comparisons here it's worth noting that 83% of Republicans were concerned about extremism spreading compared to 56% overall 71% of Republicans believe that Islam is not compatible with American values compared to 42% overall 60% of Republicans do not agree that Muslim Americans are as patriotic as other Americans 66% of Republicans would be concerned if a mosque or Islamic center were built in their neighborhood compared to 33% overall and what's worth noting here and we'll get into this in the panel discussion is while there are certainly stronger views by those who self-identify as Republicans the concerns that individuals have on a full range of issues span across political party affiliation there was in terms of perceived discrimination we wanted to get a sense of do respondents think that there's discrimination against a set of minorities and 71% of respondents said that there is discrimination against Muslims 68% said the same for transgenders 67% for blacks and interestingly 35% said that they perceive that there's discrimination or a lot of discrimination against Jews in America skepticism about hate crime reporting overall is relatively low and so a number of advocacy groups have done quite a bit of work on getting out these numbers of the last couple of years and we were interested I was surprised to see that these views turned out as they are so I thought it was a positive sign that we saw so many respondents saying they believe that these hate crime reporting reports are accurate so and lastly not lastly but I should say that one of the interesting things and we certainly want to get into this in the panel was we asked an open-ended question what percentage of America do Muslims represent and we got 17% so if you want to put this in perspective the actual percentage is 1% and so one of the limits of this kind of survey work is that you can't drill down this requires additional research but it's worth noting that 17% is a sizable an incorrect number but if you couple that with some of the concerns and fears that people have together that is quite disconcerting and let me just get in here to comparing between the national sample and the DMV area this was also I think our hypothesis was that we would see the DMV area to be more open-minded and more knowledgeable but let me just take you through some of the figures here so this is comparing DC with the DMV area with the national sample so the national sample is the darker color and the DMV area is the lighter so there's a lot of discrimination against Jews the DMV area is more than the national area same, well it's on par with Muslims in terms of what the national respondents thought and the DMV area in terms of anti-Semitic hate crimes again the numbers are pretty similar percentage of population that is Muslim interestingly enough here in the DMV area respondents thought that Muslims make up 20% of the population do you know a Muslim personally? this was another surprise the DMV area 34% so they personally know a Muslim has there been a rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes? it's about the same and do Muslims contribute significantly or somewhat to the US economy? it's 10% less here in the DMV area and so which is interesting given that the DMV area is highly educated and it's an area where you have a disproportionate number of doctors lawyers, attorneys, engineers and so on other interesting comparisons are Muslims as patriotic as other Americans in the DMV area 10% less? increase in Muslim candidates is a positive sign it's about the same concern if a mosque or Islamic center is built in your neighborhood 50% here in the DMV area concern about extremism spreading in Muslim communities 68% in the DMV area compared to 56% comfort with Muslims wearing a veil in public or attire 35% should Muslims be subject to extra security screening at the airport 43% nearly 10% higher here in the DMV area and lastly do you believe that Islam do they believe that Islam with American values it's 50% so a little bit higher but as you can see the there are significant differences and this is what we wanted to know we didn't know going in we had some assumptions I think a number of our assumptions were wrong but the whole purpose of this study is to try and understand what public perceptions are but to also see if there are areas where we can influence or inform rather policy discussions in a broader public conversation and so with that I think we're going to turn it over to the panel discussion now but I just want to take a minute to thank AMI for their extraordinary work for those of you in the audience enjoying the food and small bottles of water this never you know you watch these events and you don't realize how much goes on behind the scenes and so I really want to give a heartfelt thanks to AMI and in no order Dr. Rahman Shafiq Khan Ambassador Islam and especially Shahad Rahman who I think we talked maybe three times a day for the last month because there's so much work going into this and this is just the first step what we hope to do next is additional research to try and fill down so thank you for listening and if you have questions about the study we can I think get into those afterwards in the Q&A but right now we're going to move to the panel discussion just a clock thank you all for coming to spend your lunch hour with us here to talk about attitudes towards American Muslims I'm Hannah Alam from BuzzFeed news I cover US Muslim life on a national level and I've worked with or talked to a lot of people so I really hope that we can have this be a really interactive event so please keep up your questions in mind and we'll just get started thank you both for all this for the work and also just I wanted to take a second to shout out the work that the Center here does because as someone who covers US Muslims there's not a lot of scholarship and research out there so these are very valuable tools and I guess the first question I have is when you set out to do this where do you hope it goes and why when you looked at the extra sampling in those cities why were those cities in particular chosen and so maybe that's for you when we when New American AMI sat down last summer one of the things that we recognized is that there's lots of sentiment out there so you've got some negative sentiment and you've got some positive sentiment but there's really a lack of scholarship and data and so we wanted to think about what can we do to put forward scholarship and data that can influence or inform a public conversation we did these four cities because we wanted to get a sense these are four very different kinds of cities and we wanted to get a sense of what's going on at the local level but we also want to use the findings to put this in the hands of local journalists elected officials and policy makers because they are voices of authority and they are best positioned to be able to respond to the data and act on it but when I've heard this in different cities when Muslim community leaders go to a mayor or a mayor's office and they say I'm really concerned about X the mayor is concerned in most cases but without any data it's super hard for the mayor to respond and so this is a helpful step in that direction how do you get the information to them what comes next? this is AMI and New America working together doing outreach to journalists, elected officials and policy makers we wanted to do this study in the lead up to the midterm because this is a time when Muslims in many places are punching back and knowing what the general public's views are is super, super helpful maybe that's a good practice to move to you we do knowing what the general public thinks is helpful especially in a measurable way like this we kind of knew, right? we had suspicions, what surprised you from the findings and maybe you could talk a little bit about how AMI plans to use the results the first and most important reason for doing this research was to get data that could be actionable so data that would guide us in terms of connecting with the legislators connecting with politicians connecting with media and so on the surprises were again not really expected but at the same time if you've ever been in business and on research you know your data is always going to inform you and give you some surprises in our case part of the reason why we tried to do the four other cities was to just get a feel for how different these cities were relative to the rest of the US in fact as we also saw in the election before the 2016 historic catastrophe we also realized that the expectations from pollsters and researchers actually were all wrong and here we wanted to do something that was going to give us the best view at the national level but also at a relatively micro level and these are not really small cities and the DMV is very influential was that a finding where you were surprised I'm sorry I was shocked I was shocked because as individually I've been thinking and talking about the Washington DC area as one of the most enlightened or one of the most progressive one of the most hospitable regions for internationality and that was really a shock I actually want to go further into why these numbers were what they were just to add to that Ambassador Shahad and I were at a meeting a few weeks ago in McLean and we were talking with someone and I didn't want to cite them but from one of the prominent mosques here and he said I really don't think you're going to find anything interesting in the DMV areas I think this is one of the more welcoming areas and I said how do you know that and he said well because you know, Tim Cain's great Senator Warren's great and I said okay but what does your average man and woman think elected officials are going to be equally concerned about this and again my role here at New America is not advocacy but it's to build a body of scholarship and data but this is something where AMI and I mean I have no doubt that Senators from Maryland and Virginia are going to want to see this data because it's not what one would expect I mean we've talked a little bit about and you did in your remarks about sort of how it seems to be on some level a study in contradictions where 85% of the country says we tolerate Muslims we welcome Muslims, we recognize their contributions except and yet we have problems or anxieties about how they dress, where they worship pretty much everything that makes them the community they are so how do you square that? I have another piece of research that I'd like to talk about which we were very limited limitation in time, limitation in money limitations on resources who would conduct this research in this time so our research was largely about perceptions of Americans of us frankly one of the pieces of research we should do and we need to do is perceptions of Muslims on exactly the same questions so can you see in fact I'll go back to Muslim perceptions of fellow Muslim perceptions of themselves so how do we see ourselves do we see our values as compatible with American values let's look at that one question it's a very critical question you might also have Muslims think they're 17% of the population that's true too but the point here is there was a piece of research done quite a while back by the Gallup organization for unity productions it came out as what do a billion Muslims think and that was worldwide the interesting thing was they were perceptions of democracy and women's rights and so on in many Muslim countries that were actually stronger and better than in the US itself so I think we do need to look at the gap between the perception Muslims of themselves perceptions of Americans of themselves and then figure out how to bridge the gap so for instance if we believe that and we do believe that Muslim values are completely compatible with democracy one could argue that the first democracy started 1400 years ago didn't last very long but it started there and that was Muslim values and then we ended up in a situation where now this perception is huge so how do we close that gap and I think those are some of the things that we're hoping to get out of this what do you see in the discrepancy I'm doing a survey with Muslim communities in Houston which I touched on earlier asking them all of these questions amongst themselves and that survey will start by asking what's your religion and if one doesn't self-identify as Muslim they're thanked and the survey continues without them I think that and I can tell you having worked in government and think tanks and academia that we don't know a lot about Muslim communities I know the Gallup study well but there are significant differences within the US, within different communities even in Houston the African American Muslim communities not at all like the Arab Muslim community there these are very very different communities and then you have Islam and Espanyol you've got it we are still dealing with the muscle memory of 9-11 and not having data means that people are making decisions that are not informed by facts and it's informed by assumptions and sentiment and the whole purpose of this is to try and get away from that and say whether we like it or not here's what the data says and if somebody else doesn't agree with the findings that's okay they can go find their own survey we'd like to see more work in the space Pew's done excellent work on these on this very topic and but as our friend and scholar here from Pew can attest to these are super expensive studies well and that brings me to something you were saying that without the data people are left to their own assumptions but those assumptions are informed by an entire industry that is well funded and sophisticated and delivers those assumptions and misinformation how do you counter that? you cover these issues so we hope at some point you will reflect on these findings but we hope that in my mind the three groups of individuals who are best positioned to try and influence public opinion as journalists elected officials and policy makers it doesn't mean they all want to listen I mean that they're all going to references but just making sure that people are aware of the data that's super super important otherwise we're where we currently are you've got some folks who are working with good sentiments saying they're just like us and what does that mean and then you've got folks on the other side saying we need to be really worried but what I want to get away from either of those conversations and say here's what the data shows and I think putting the data I'm convinced putting this data in the hands of our Senators from Virginia and Maryland and I spoke with the mayor's office from Charlottesville she wants to see this so on the elected officials I mean it's easy I guess to read some of the findings and when you hear I think Republicans were people who identified as Republican in the survey were one and a half times more likely to have these concerns about how Muslims dress, move through the airport, worship where they build their moths, run for office is it it's too easy though as we've talked about I think to see this as a partisan problem right does that left does that left the Democrats off too easy what's the story behind that the data bears us out and I mean I think that you have a number of vectors arrayed that have shaped these views I mean Hillary Clinton when talking about violent extremism often talked about Muslim communities being in the front lines what does that say about Muslim communities I mean you don't step back and think about that and I know she didn't mean that in a way that was I don't think she meant that in a derogatory way but like if Muslim communities are on the front lines what does that suggest is happening at the local level with Muslim communities in the U.S. but the default sort of view is always through a national and this is somebody who's nuanced and thoughtful and so and if this is coming from her and you know we can point to a bunch of other examples I'm using I'm using that one example but on top of that we had 36 governors who said they didn't want to take in refugees I mean so when you have voices of authority who are saying I'm worried about refugees but specifically Muslim refugees coming here from Syria you have average Americans who are looking to them and their own views are being shaped by this so it is far more complicated than just Republicans or Democrats but I think there's no escaping the muscle memory we have from 9-11 and so you know the best we can do is try and you know do these kinds of projects to try and see what's going on there to see what kind of concerns they have and I should add that you know to steal some of Shafiq's you know thunder here is that one of the points that he pushed is he didn't want to just do another survey he wanted us to do everything we can to understand what kinds of people have what kinds of misinformation and fears so that we could think about that they could think about how to potentially engage those communities so is it worth engaging with Republicans can you are you what would that look like because it would seem that you know if the numbers show that that's the biggest problem let's for a while forget about Republicans and Democrats and just go into the data not necessarily from this report but others too that have happened and look at the perceptions of Muslims within certain segments of population so there's a report I can't exactly tell you which one it is that talks about the 5th the top 5th percentiles people who had the worst opinion of Muslims didn't know any Muslims 80% of them had not met a Muslim they did not know a Muslim and perhaps the rest didn't know very many so when you get something like that and we as a national organization and AMI's objective is both to work with the community within the community but also outside with media with legislators with thought leaders with interfaith leaders you actually say why in our case the why is also because frankly many of us come from communities that were fairly established and we come in here and pretty much going to our own cocoon we only connect with our own and we don't end up making ourselves known to our neighbors and as soon as people know us in fact I think I've seen a study I wish I could recall that better talked about people who actually had Muslims working for them or Muslims as their bosses ended up having the most favorable perception so that actually establishes something for us to do as a community I wanted to ask you about that since 9-11 it seems that groups like yours and many others have been on almost a nonstop charm offensive I mean condemning and apologizing and issuing statements and inviting to mosques and you all just had I think a block party to invite neighbors to show what Muslims do but I think to be honest we've not done it as well as we should and we haven't done it enough frankly I haven't done a block party in my neighborhood and I should but at the end of the day I think these are the kinds of things interfaith there's a lot more interfaith work happening I mean AMI is actually conducting a lot of it which is wonderful and every time we do it it seems to really make a difference and there are people coming to you at the end of it who are telling you that they have a perception now that's significantly better and improved so I think we just need to make sure that we use research like this to work both within the influence makers and also within our own community and use it for again connecting better making our image better what do you say to a young there is I mean I've noticed my reporting a strain kind of a refrain among younger Muslims especially saying we're done with the condemning and the apologizing and everything and we're tired of we know there's a willful blindness that we recognize now and maybe that's even reflected somewhat in there how do you who's gettable and who's not to some degree I think it's a question of engaging and engaging in one very very heartening thing that I see is the political arena 100 people running as you said Bobby in our county Montgomery County there are lots of people here who actually do a lot of political work and we had seven people run this year which is actually seven more than most other elections and of the seven the three that got elected now that engagement was fantastic and the one thing that to me was most heartening was the fact that instead of cowering and shrinking and you know walking away they actually went straight in and I think that's where they need organizations like ours to actually pave the way for them to do more of that on the political front we've not really talked about AMI doing very much there other than connecting with the establishment that exists but perhaps that's a role for AMI to play in the future in terms of just promoting and helping Muslims get elected nationally so that's the foundation to do that I was going to ask you Bobby when you look at I guess when you look at the midterms and this I mean it's really unprecedented this number of Muslim candidates across the board at all levels are you seeing people emerge that you think have staying power do you think this is a flash in the pan moment no I don't I think that this is something that I suspect we will look back upon where people say 20 years from now 10 years from now you're going to hear folks say I was 15 and I heard the president say X above my community and I decided then that I wanted to be a U.S. Senator and that's why I'm now a U.S. Senator I mean I suspect that's coming but it's down the road I mean that's my impression but everywhere I've traveled and I'm from southeast Michigan which has a very large Muslim community in a very large Arab Christian community and people are fired up and getting involved doesn't mean everybody and there are different ideas about what engagement involvement looks like but you have people getting involved here in DC I didn't realize this AMI told me that there's something like 70 organizations here that are Muslim-led or Muslim-run I mean some of them are small but I mean the point is that ain't nothing and so you've got I think a lot of activity going on and I think it's only going to grow but it takes time I think that I travel all over the country and if you go to any mosque on a Friday for Juma prayer they can raise an enormous amount of money for disaster relief overseas I mean it's eye-popping and here and domestic I mean they can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars they can also raise to a far lesser extent for political activity and for an even lesser extent for this kind of research activity but I think all of that is changing because I think people realize if they don't want to get involved then they're going to have to see the reports about them on CNN or Fox News or whatever that are either uninformed or misinformed and not always but there's there's I think so no I don't think this is a flash in the pan at all I think the real limit to lemonade here is that you're going to see a community that is engaging and I can tell you in Atlanta specifically you've got the community engaging other minority communities there that they didn't even know about five years ago and now they do regular meetings so that to me is a huge positive I used to get a lot of press releases and things about you know a poetry night or something and I just got I get them for mother of all foam banks was when I got yesterday about from Muslim groups I just want to follow up a little point which is important here because there's no question that there were significant differences between the different party affiliations but one of the things that we will do is engage with folks on both sides of the aisle at a minimum to make sure that they have this data because I regularly brief members up on the hill and their staff and my impression is not with everybody but with many members they want more data they want to see this kind of data because they don't know so that is certainly something we'll be doing should we open to questions anybody have any questions sir one second we've got microphones coming this is being live streamed and reported so we're going to wait until we get mics for everyone thank you this was an excellent report and I'm delighted that AMI and New America partnered in this effort because it's a very necessary first step and I say first step because clearly from your own discussion it's evident that much more needs to be done to unpack some of the findings as well as to create new bases for going forward including the idea of polling the American Muslim community itself just one comment first I think there's already debate about the actual size of the Muslim community in the United States the figure that Bobby used is the lower figure there are other figures out there that are three or four times that and even President Obama used a much higher figure so maybe we can try and get a little more clarity on that at some point on the total number of Muslims in America good luck on that there's some pollsters in here I know I've talked to about that it is extremely difficult before we start examining what the American Muslims are doing for themselves secondly the question I have is about the demographic breakdown in terms of age groups of the respondents to this survey as well as to the one that you plan for the American Muslims I think it's critical to differentiate between the first generation American immigrant of Muslim origin and their children and there are people in this room in the Obama administration for instance who are the new vanguard I think in this and it would be very critical to try and get from them a sense of how they perceive their role and in which of the professions that they are choosing as opposed to which of the professions that their parents are choosing so from my point of view I'd like to know a little bit more do you see that changing do you see our aunties and uncles becoming more supportive of going into journalism or to politics or to different fields where there can be absolutely when you think about the composition of the board of AMI it's regrettably aunties and uncles but the thing is that's not what I wanted to do thank you Tharek you're the exception that proves the rule but the fact is I think we should not also downplay the role of the aunties and uncles and actually addressing these issues stepping up to them now I think we've got to get the younger generation to step up with us as well and I think it is so in the future I expect that they will be far greater participation and also perhaps more effective participation just because they are better able to engage with the mainstream but do you see change among the Muslim families and communities do you see real change about encouraging young people to run supporting them to step out to maybe roles that traditionally our parents generation sort of said no the answer is yes but not enough so my answer would be not enough but yes hi I'm Yusra Ghazi with America Indivisible here in DC and thank you all for presenting this really phenomenal set of findings from your survey one of our partner organizations the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding ISPU is part of their annual American Muslim poll which they do try to get a sense of what American Muslims think they found I think in the most recent one that compared to all other communities Muslims had the highest more than any other group they felt most negative attitudes towards other Muslims that other Muslims would be likely to commit negative actions and so I think they made the connection they're trying and they're writing about this finding had made the connection between the ways that media and media pollution about Muslim Americans impacts non-Muslims and Muslims and creates internalized Islamophobia as well so I wonder if in your findings in any demographic profiles you've been able to put together on the respondents are you also taking a look at media consumption in addition to the existence of or the lack of relationships with Muslim people are you also looking at where they get their information about Muslim Americans that no source was on the poll yeah we do we ask we ask respondents where they get their media from and yeah so we definitely wanted to see that and there was a range of responses I remember it was you know MSNBC and Breitbart those were all on there let's see maybe on the side hi I'm Walter Ruby from Greater Washington Muslim Jewish Forum I was fascinated by this high level of Islamophobia aspects of it in DC and it evoked for me a survey and I don't remember which survey and I don't know exactly what year but it might have been 20 years or more ago when I was covering I was working for a Jewish newspaper on Long Island among others and we were all shocked by a poll maybe it was from the ADL I'm not sure now that showed a strikingly high incidence of antisemitism on Long Island which of course has had a large Jewish community maybe 20-25% I'm not sure I remember the numbers so the question was somehow what you just said now evokes that in me that perhaps sometimes you may have situations where people for example may what I remember thinking of the time was some people were saying well I've got lots of Jewish friends and I know so I sort of almost feel free to sort of say that I'm uncomfortable with this or that aspect because I'm not anti-Jewish or something like that and I'm just wondering and maybe just to follow up also on the other cities that you talked about which I think are also have fairly large Muslim communities did you see a higher incidence perhaps of some of these things than you might have seen in Kansas or somewhere else These are great questions Hannah and I were talking yesterday I'm from southeast Michigan we did not do an over-sampling of greater southeast Michigan but I'm pretty convinced that familiarity does not always breed better relations I mean what I hear anecdotally southeast Michigan from non-Muslims is why don't they learn the language why do they want to allow lunches in the schools why can't they fit in one step above and no goes over and a place where you have again a bunch of doctors, lawyers, engineers it's a mix of backgrounds so I'm I'm pretty convinced of that and the next round of research we'll look at that but we're going to be rolling out the findings for Houston and Tampa and Orlando and we already know in a preliminary way Houston is not fantastic Orlando is not fantastic Tampa is a little bit better and Bobby you've done some work with Houston fairly extensively in the last year and a half right? What are you doing down there? We're doing a major study looking at what the Muslim community looks like break down by community by community and we're doing a survey with Muslims to ask them very similar questions how patriotic do you think how patriotic are you relative to other communities and we're asking these questions my hypothesis is that we're going to see positive results but the whole point of this is to have results on both sides so you can see what a non-Muslims think but also what a Muslims think because we don't know there's a lot of guessing Also there's the risk because we've all talked about what do Muslims think it's something that we talk about a lot in news not presenting one big one population that doesn't have all these diverse communities in Houston there's one community that built a very big mosque and they had problems with pig races on Fridays when they were building this mosque and until it was covered by the media now many people knew about it but this is a minority Muslim community within the bigger community and so they didn't share this with Muslims so folks didn't know about this until the Houston Chronicle covered and so there's an awful lot happening at the local level that I think people just assume that some Muslim community everyone knows they don't know so we want to try and better understand what's going on let's get a couple more questions in the back there hi I'm Leda Rawa I'm with the Tempest so my question specifically relates to the definition of Muslim in this survey black Muslims have been in DC from day one they actually arguably have the first mosque here in DC so when we're talking about first gen Muslims and the children of those Muslims that's the immigrant population and so I'm wondering if that nuance is going to be reflected in future surveys because we have Muhammad Ali being praised by our president but he's also Muslim and he's black so that kind of is a different dichotomy so that's kind of my question because I feel like this you know I'm an immigrant Muslim so obviously I'm biased but you know there's just been a lot of focus on the normal definition of Muslims in America which is immigrant not black Muslims the survey asks the general public their views on Muslims and if we were to get into these nuances I think we're going to lose them pretty quickly I think our friend and scholar from you could probably answer this better than I and when we're doing the survey in Houston among Muslims we do ask though how do they self identify we don't ask we're not concerned about how religious they are but what we're concerned about is do they self identify as Muslim that's sort of the cut off I did wonder when there was something like 34% of people here in the DMV said they didn't know I'm Muslim and I do wonder how much that is where you see the erasure like did you not know Abdul down the street as Muslim do you not know because you're the image that you're fed every day of a Muslim is my family yeah let's see sure I was just curious you talked a little bit about the partisan splits and some of these views did you capture any differences by religious group or like religious affiliation or lack affiliation where people who are more religious or who are identified as even gelco-christian or something more or less we asked a set of questions so we asked to self identify and we have we listed quite a few religions so not just the major religions are you Baha'i you know I mean we went through the list I mean just all the way through it we also asked individuals to self identify how religious they would describe themselves we also asked how often do they go to church or temple or some house of worship so we do ask these questions let me just one other thing that so what we're going to be doing is we're going to be posting all of the data so we can find it in New America so that others can again can look at this and make you know if they want to contest our findings they can go out and do their own survey and we would welcome that but the whole purpose of this is to make this as transparent as possible and we want it to be publicly available so that it's useful to folks such as yourself and your colleagues over at Pew and elsewhere there was a question presenting the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism which is the largest denomination of Judaism in North America and I'm wondering how you see the implications or the opportunities for non-Muslim institutions and organizations to help get this information out there to help act in partnership and act in friendship what can we be doing to support the very diverse and very complicated Muslim community within our own communities AMI is very big on interfaith when we talk about that I see that as a key opportunity for us and I also see I was actually shocked also to get some research recently that said perceptions of Jews were not very positive either in fact the gap between perceptions of Muslims and perceptions of Jews were relatively similar and it was like that is a big issue and I think speaks to us needing to partner needing to address this together perhaps the issues underlying negative perception Muslims and negative perceptions of Jews are different but at the end of the day I think we need to understand them well and perhaps to the extent we can jointly address them great to the extent we can individually address them to learn from each other be shut absolutely shut because at the end of the day when you think about hate and negative perceptions they are actually really bad for the country they are bad for the world I mean if we were just a family and we had everybody hating each other how the family function and at the end of the day the world is a family too so I think we need to figure this out and we need to work with other organizations effectively just to follow up on I think on your terrific point I'm doing quite a bit of work here looking at online hate and the research is increasingly clear that online the folks who don't like Jews, don't like Muslims or blacks or gays these folks online are pretty aggressive there are many minority communities and my assumption is that in the real world it's not this similar I mean on the ground so I think it's a hugely important point but I think this is also one of the things we're seeing coming out of this particular environment is that you see I know it's going on in Atlanta I know it's going on in Houston you have communities that are engaging that would not have been engaging not for any negative reason but for the energy to do so five years ago but now I think folks are seeing that well guess what you've got a swastika spray painted on a synagogue you've got someone throwing a pig's head through a mosque window I mean this is beyond the pale and so you see communities coming together so I think AMI is doing terrific work on this front and it's interesting one of the findings showed that gap between you know that there's Americans recognize a clear discrimination against black people, Muslims transgender people but then it fell off for for anti-Jewish sort of discrimination that was interesting as chairman of AMI I see what are our responsibility now after you people have done this fantastic research and I'm amazed with the propensity of data going against or not in favor of the Muslims that's also a very disappointing situation even though the Muslims are trying their best to be part of the American culture, American strata American dream whatever you call it I think for us there are two challenges one is our representation in the media is practically zero so then American population hears the word Islam or Muslim in two months or three months and that too by the passing way there is no commentator on the media or the TV stations you know are watching the post on your time there's a big gulf word we have the second thing what I'm thinking loud is our mosques are not doing the job what they should be doing you know when we get in that four walls when we get in that environment we become very much constrained to the religion and not that much to the outside world you know and I guess what we have to do as AMI with lot of Muslim other organization together to really open up the dimension of the mosque not make them only a prayer place make them on every kind of activity which you can go there and interact and I guess that would be a challenge which we have to take not New America but we have to take the challenge so more media representation and opening the mosques up to I would add that we have a fantastic journalist that I know of that sits on the stage with us right now I would add that I do have to take a shoot that's actually an exciting point we are getting a lot more representation and even major publications now with beats dedicated to that or at least really covering at least committed to covering Muslims in a more nuanced way but yes right now we're all drinking from a firehouse just to add one more point we have one person I think he's here today he set up this great project called Muslim Marine Muslim Marine but I mention this I don't know where is he at can you just raise your hand if you're here anyhow there's lots of interesting projects going on out there this was where during Ramadan we were matching marines just to go Muslim service members to go and have iftar with right yeah I think you got a nice write up on that we have time for applause for gentlemen yeah absolutely as the sister of two Muslim marines Ahmed and Muhammad I took a special notice of your program let's see here yeah hi my name is Dr. Tazeen Hashmi and I Bobby by the way went to high school in Detroit we're at Kastak High School in downtown and I have recently started working in Baltimore with Institute of Islamic Christian and Jewish Studies ICJS as your what you were referring to a little while ago what I want you to say was that what I have noticed is that before September 11th there was a positive curiosity about Muslims and less engagement by Muslims since then there is I would say thousand fold more engagement by Muslims but negative curiosity so no matter how much we engage I am part of that generation which is fatigued of working trying to be my own advocate it has come the and my children they all have come to a point where they are not interested in doing that and I think the willy pulpit is with the politicians with the media and group like AMI is actually where as Muslims we need to now become organized and support studies like this so what you were saying that mayors and senators and congressmen would be interested in these studies because we are their constituents and support organizations to produce data so that somebody on our behalf could be fatigued amongst Muslims who have been doing a lot of work but we really don't see it going anywhere thank you we talked a little bit about that but how do you combat that fatigue I mean how do you wish I had the answer we would all be out there doing maybe we have time for probably yours and maybe one more quick one Saif Rahman from Darlu Islamic Center Bobby two quick questions is there anything that shocked you when you were doing this and the second question is what would be we've got Senator Cain coming to Darlu Hijra tomorrow for example what would be a policy recommendation coming out of this for our politicians that we should be adopting a couple of things that I wouldn't say shocked me but we are surprised that the disproportionate number of respondents don't believe that there's discrimination against Jews I thought that was pretty pretty troubling the other thing was just the discrepancy between the views and the DMV area on so many issues relative to the national area I mean I just we were just at an event at McLean and someone told me from another center essentially under control here and I said okay let's see what the study says so those were the two the two things I think that you should hand the Senator the one page that just shows the difference between the DMV area and the national area I mean I don't just showing him a couple of those points because I suspect the Senator will be surprised to hear this and disappointed frankly just to be clear by putting this data in journalist hands or elected officials hands doesn't mean they're jumping in front of a camera to talk about this but when these issues come up they can at least address them in an informed way also to their own staff maybe we need to do a better job when we're at non-Muslim events maybe reflecting that our Muslim brothers and sisters are also contributing here I think that the response to this is nuanced and but super important but I just think the one page which we can get to you and we're working on pulling together some information we're going to have I mean there's hundreds of pages of cross tabs and banners which is not going to be useful to anyone frankly here other than Bashir okay we have to wrap up questions okay one here and one there let's do them pretty quick if we can we only have a couple minutes left and we'll let you have the last part hi I'm Margaret Johnson I'm with the Ezra Blue Mosque Fairfax Virginia the Institute for Islamic and Turkish Studies and I really want to commend you guys New America and AMI on doing this really important work thank you so much and I have several questions for you in comments but I'll just ask you one can you draw clear through line what is your thinking about you said you wanted to release this right before the elections what is the dynamic that you're hoping for is it that this is going to increase Muslim voter turnout what is the thinking there I wanted to be clear we wanted to conduct this in the lead up to the elections and when we released it was just based on availability I'm not doing advocacy for either party what we wanted to do was try and capture the general public's views on Muslim Americans and the lead up to the election that was the key thing that we're doing the event today as opposed to November 10th it was just a matter of scheduling and right here maybe the last question actually can we thank you for the excellent work this is going to be the first step in many more important things we can do together my question is this is just one particular question that really struck me as odd this was about when you ask people if they personally know a Muslim the percent of people who said yes just defies logic to me and I wonder how the question was framed and whether some people think that they've heard of Muhammad bin Salman so they personally know a Muslim if there was some confusion about that or conversely they knew a Turkish guy down the street and didn't know he was a Muslim the short answer to that is that we commissioned this with a firm called SSRS and they do lots of work in this space they test the survey we're going to send all this out it will be up online as well I can't tell you what's in someone's head when they answered that but that's what respondents said that's all we know it was asked that way but I mean it's essentially do you personally know a Muslim and you know let me just add one small point I know we have to wrap up here in two minutes is that what the survey does there's a lot of other things that the survey doesn't get at I'll just give you an example I was at a dinner in Ann Arbor, Michigan a couple of months ago at a Muslim family's home there were a lot of friends of issues and the wife who's not veiled who's a cardiologist overheard one of her colleagues saying something pretty nasty about Muslims and this is someone she's worked with for five years and she says to her colleague do you know I'm Muslim and the colleague said no I didn't realize that and then she said do you know what you've just said is offensive and the colleague said I'm sorry but you're not like them with her response that kind of research can do and so we can follow up on that but I think we have one final question do you want to use the microphone oh here can you use the mic please for that recording and I think your question is very good except we are the same way of being a five one C three we are not in advocacy but we felt the focus on Muslim issues especially what Bobby said Muslims being the punching bag in the election cycle 2018 is not no different not only Muslims all minorities in this case people of color so what we want to do is time this release of this study hopefully the people journalists in the room and media will pick up some of the results and publicize this and this is the thinking but I think I want to say one thing we have worked it out for us especially all of you who are including in the double digit increase in the perceptions, negative perceptions Muslims in the DC metro area so I think we have worked it out one thing we will do is we will definitely share these results with all the area of mosques and Islamic community centers and all this secondly Bobby and I I think we would like to see a joint letter, cover letter going out and make copies available of this report to all members of Congress the U.S. Senate and Congress after the election have the new members coming joining Congress so the next Congress we should be supplying 535 copies of this one copy to each member of Congress thank you all and where can they find the report you can find the report online newamerica.org the Muslim Diaspora Initiative alright thank you all for coming thank you