More than one out of every three Muslims in the UK believe that “Jews have too much power,” a new survey has found.
The poll, which was carried out by Britain’s Channel 4, found that anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are much more common among Muslims than among other Brits.
In particular, British Muslims are more likely to believe that Jews have too much power in general, as well as having too much power in the government, media, international banking and businesses.
The survey questioned 1,081 Muslims and 1,008 non-Muslims, and will be fully presented as part of a documentary titled “What British Muslims Really Think” on Wednesday.
Only 26 percent of the Muslim respondents said that anti-Semitism is “a problem” in modern Britain, compared with 46 percent of non-Muslims.
As mentioned above, 35 percent of Muslims agreed that Jewish people have too much power in the UK. Only nine percent of non-Muslims said the same.
When questioned about specific fields, 39 percent of Muslim respondents said Jews have too much control over the media and 44 percent said Jews have too much power in businesses. Ten and 18 percent of non-Muslims said the same, respectively.
More than a quarter of Muslim respondents, 26 percent, believe that Jews are responsible for most wars around the world. A mere six percent of non-Muslim Brits agreed with this.
Forty percent of Muslims claimed that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the UK, 27 percent said that Jews are hated because of the way they behave, and 34 percent said Jews talk “too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.”
Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the host of What British Muslims Really Think, said that the poll’s results are “extremely worrying.”
During an interview on BBC Radio 4, he explained that “on specific issues – families, sexuality, gender, attitudes towards Jews and on questions of violence and terrorism – the center of gravity of British Muslim opinion is some distance away from the center of gravity of everyone else’s opinion.”
Phillips added that these results show more than just different opinions and political preferences.
“One in six Muslims say they would like to live more separately, a quarter would like to live under sharia law. It means that as a society we have a group of people who basically do not want to participate in the way that other people [do].
“What we also found is that there is a correspondence between this desire to live separately and sympathy for terrorism. People who want to live separately are about twice as likely to say that they have sympathy for terrorist acts. Anybody, including most people in the Muslim community, would find that extremely worrying.”
