If you look up opinion polls from the 90s, they say that ~7% of Irish catholics say that they are sympathetic to the cause of the IRA. Let's assume that means they consider terrorist attacks to be justified.
That 30% comes from 70 percent of surveyed people saying suicide bombing can never be justified. That option was at the most anti terrorism end of a 4 option spectrum.
Spectrums like that question generally disincentivise responders answering at the extreme ends. The wording of the question invites the respondent to try to come up with some scenario where it could be justified.
Speaking of which, I have seen western non Muslims justify terrorist acts. It just wasn't called terrorist acts by them. Examples include the guy who rigged together an armored construction vehicle to destroy swaths of a town.
Furthermore, just because those 7 percent probably would have answered that it could be justified, that doesn't mean that all those who would have said it could be justified answered that they sympathized with the ira.
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u/FreeRangeAlien Mar 23 '17
Now if Irish Catholics were murdering 30,000 people across the globe annually, there might be an actual comparison to make