A new Pew poll shows that people in Muslim-majority nations also fear Islamic extremism. This contradicts the Republican Party’s collective message.

We know by now that Republican leaders have a habit of Islam-bashing, and that Herman Cain of course takes the cake.

The definitely-won’t-win presidential candidate called a potential Tennessee mosque “an abuse of our freedom of religion,” and said he wouldn’t hire a Muslim for his cabinet, though later changed that word to “terrorist,” as if terrorists and Muslim people are one and the same.

The GOP’s other White House hopefuls aren’t much better: when he was Minnesota’s governor, Tim Pawlenty canceled a state-run mortgage program for Muslims, and a spokesperson later bragged, “As soon as Gov. Pawlenty became aware of the issue, he personally ordered it shut down.”

The issue, in case you couldn’t tell, is that the program specifically helped Muslims.

Elsewhere in the party, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum signed their John Hancocks to a social conservative “marriage pledge” that demanded candidates actively oppose Sharia law, a synonym for “terrorism,” while Newt Gingrich compared the “Ground Zero” Mosque’s organizers to Nazis and fretted that his grandchildren could grow up in a dystopia “dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

These rote arguments, all of which rest on the assumption that all Muslims are terrorists, create barriers not only between non-Muslim Americans and Muslim Americans, but also between Americans and the Middle East, a land the GOP wants voters to believe is populated solely by suicide bombers looking to come here and blow us all to Kingdom Come.

These right wing contentions want to create the illusion that Muslim-majority nations are so foreign, so backward, so inhuman that they must either be destroyed or avoided, depending on whether the political winds blow toward intervention or isolation.

And the scary thing is that they work: about half of Americans “have an unfavorable view of Islam,” according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, and “31 percent think mainstream Islam encourages violence against non-Muslims.”

A Pew Research poll put out today also reports that 69 percent of the United States, and majorities of Western nations as a whole, are worried about Islamic extremism. This fear and Republican messaging have a symbiotic relationship: they feed into and off of one another.

Curiously, the same Pew poll shows that people living in Muslim-majority nations are also concerned about Islamic extremism:

More than seven-in-ten Palestinian and Lebanese Muslims are worried about Islamic extremists in their countries, as are most Muslims in Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey. For Muslims, the most common concern about extremism is that it is violent, although in both Egypt and the Palestinian territories the top fear is that extremism could divide the country.