BBC: “Islam hates us,” Republican frontrunner Donald Trump said in a CNN interview on Friday.
Mr Trump later stood by his claim in a televised debate in Miami, saying: “There is tremendous hatred, and I will stick with exactly what I said.”
It led to an outcry, with Senator Marco Rubio launching an impassioned defence of Muslims.
There are clearly some radical Muslims who despise the US and other Western countries – including those who carried out the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.
But what of Donald Trump’s claim that Muslims in general hate the country?
No major polling agency has yet asked whether respondents “hate” America. However, several have measured broad sentiment among the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.
The Pew Research Centre, which surveys global attitudes, said anti-Americanism was strong around the word around the time of the US invasion of Iraq.
However, currently there is little evidence of profound anti-American sentiment except for in a handful of countries, it says.
Bruce Stokes, director of global economic attitudes at Pew, says sentiment towards the US varies widely between Muslim-majority countries.
Categories: ISLAM, Religions, The Muslim Times, US Politics, USA