“Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream” is the title of the Pew Research Center study released last week. An alternative title could have been: “Muslim Americans: Increasingly Extreme.”

Authors of the first nationwide survey to measure the demographics, attitudes and experiences of Muslim Americans concluded that Muslims living in the United States are “largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world.”

When this same survey, however, found that about one quarter of Muslim Americans under age 30 regard suicide bombing in the name of Islam as justified in at least some circumstances, one wonders whether “moderate” and “mostly mainstream” are the most appropriate terms to describe Muslims in America.

The media for the most part have chosen to go with the “mostly mainstream” slant, with headlines appearing like “Most U.S. Muslims Reject Suicide Bombings,” “Pew Study Sees Muslim Americans Assimilating” and “Muslim Americans in Line With U.S. Values.”

A closer look at the study, however, shows just how big the non-mainstream “minority” is. And perhaps even more significant, the fact that younger age groups are more extreme than older age groups shows that the trend is clearly toward greater radicalization of Muslim Americans in the future.

A Wall Street Journal opinion column of May 25 observed:

While the survey has been represented in the media as proof of moderation among American Muslims, the actual results should yield the opposite conclusion. If, as the Pew study estimates, there are 2.35 million Muslims in America, that means there are a substantial number of people in the U.S. who think suicide bombing is sometimes justified. Similarly, if 5 percent of American Muslims support al Qaeda, that’s more than 100,000 people.

Consider: The study declares that the “overwhelming majority of Muslims in the U.S. (78 percent) say that the use of suicide bombing against civilian targets to defend Islam from its enemies is never justified” (emphasis ours). This is small comfort when there’s 22 percent who at least passively support the murdering of civilians. Among young Muslims, that figure is 31 percent—or about 219,000 people.

What’s more, 32 percent of the American Muslims surveyed either had favorable views of al Qaeda or did not express an opinion. “Yes,” wrote Michelle Malkin, “they either gave al Qaeda thumbs-up or had no opinion about the terrorist group responsible for slaughtering nearly 3,000 of their fellow Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, and responsible for a global bloodbath from Bali to Britain, the Middle East, and beyond.”

Disconcertingly, the point of reference used in the report was the surveyed opinions of extremists in other countries—including Middle Eastern and African states not necessarily known for their moderation. The study explains, “American Muslims are more opposed to suicide bombing than are Muslims in nine of the 10 other countries surveyed in 2006 ….” America compares favorably, for example, with Turkey—a country where Muslims recently slit the throats of three Christians for publishing Bibles.

“[P]resumably,” wrote Kathleen Parker, “we should be grateful that only 200,000 or so local Muslims support terrorism. … [S]eldom does America measure success according to a things-could-be-worse standard.”

The spin put on the survey of Islamic attitudes in America by both the Pew Research Center and the popular media is yet another example of timid and politically correct Western society not being willing to confront the threat of Islamic extremism. By minimizing the danger, America can stick its head in the sand a bit longer. The time is coming, however, when that will no longer be possible.