Hope y’all enjoyed your May Day. Naturally, it being May Day, I’m not doing too much work for today’s post!

So, a quick hit for today. The Pew Forum recently released a very large, detailed opinion survey of the world’s Muslims in Muslim countries and discovered — surprise! — that most Muslims are pretty conservative, religiously speaking, and that many have negative opinions about the West. Naturally, this mostly non-news is duly noted by elements of the Western right as something of which the silly progressives are somehow unaware…

The real story is that people are strange and complicated. Under a large majority that supports the introduction of sharia is a wide variation in understanding of what that means. That is because “sharia” is more an identity-symbol than an actual policy in the minds of the respondents. How could you be against the flag? Another part of the thinking is, “Islam is justice; ‘sharia’ is Islamic; therefore whatever seems to be justice must be ‘sharia’.”