Beck’s statements weren’t about public support, but rather that that 10% of Muslims are actual terrorists, which is why I considered it such a significant smear.

As Fareed Zakaria noted in his response to this claim, equating thought or speech with actual crimes is a dangerous slippery-slope that I don’t think Beck actually wants to go down. That violent acts get any level of support is obviously a problem that we should be working to combat, but polls on this issue are hard to cite as definitive evidence. Surveys of Muslim populations are necessarily influenced heavily by the particular socio-political context of each country and responses to these questions have a tendency to swing significantly as conflicts change.

While helpful to give us a snapshot of public sentiment around current events, polls like these just aren’t a great prediction of actual terrorism. That we only see a relatively small number of terrorist attacks per year, most of which are carried about by the same groups, is the most telling proof of this.