'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Arab attitudes on US, UK, France, terrorism

The Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan has recently come out with an intriguing report on the attitudes of people in five key Arab societies (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria) toward, respectively, the US, the UK, and France.

Here is an 89-page PDF file of the findings and here is the 8-page "Executive summary".

The surveys were conducted between March and June 2004 on four samples in each of the five Mashreq countries:

1. A representative national sample of 1200 respondents
2. A university students sample of 500 respondents
3. A business sample of 120 respondents
4. A media sample of 120 respondents

It is worth noting that the (apparently fairly lengthy) interviews in question were conducted between June and March of 2004. For Lebanon and Syria it is significant that that period was before the emergence of the whole issue about resolution 1559. For all the countries, it's significant that that period included the time when the Abu Ghraib abuses were coming prominently into the public domain.

I wish the people at CSS could have pulled that data together faster and gotten it out a lot earlier-- also, that they could now be presenting us with more recent data than this.

(On the other hand, I'm so behind with writing my Africa book that I am in no position at all to "throw stones" on this issue of the speed of presenting one's findings... )

I was really enjoying reading the detail in the long version of the report. For example (p.40) seeing the figures on the percentage of people in each of those countries who are unable to name any non-political personalities in each of the western countries. And there is a wealth of further detail in there, too.

However, the short version gives this summary of the findings of the survey:

The study draws seven conclusions:

1) Arabs hold coherent notions of what constitute the values of Western and Arab societies. They associate the West with individual liberty and wealth, while they view themselves as emphasizing religion and family.

2) Arab perceptions of Western societal and cultural values do not determine their attitudes toward Western foreign policies.

3) Religion is not the basis of tension between Arabs and the West.

4) The Arab world does not reject the professed goals of the West’s foreign policies toward the Arab World, but rather objects to the discrepancy between professed ideals and perceived reality.

5) Arabs disagree fundamentally with US positions on issues such as the definition of terrorism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and war in Iraq.

6) Despite disagreements and disillusionments, many Arabs desire stronger relations between their countries and the West.

7) Arab dissatisfaction with US policies is unlikely to diminish in the absence of significant US foreign policy changes...

[quotation continued:] Cultural differences are not found to be at the heart of current Arab-West tensions. Rather, the conflict is rooted in deep-seated frustration with Western, and particularly American, foreign policies.

The survey provides little evidence that the tensions between the Arab world and the West, and specifically the US will diminish. Dissatisfaction with US foreign policy is widespread across the Mashreq, regardless of variables of age, educational background and professional status. Youths and those with less education are the most likely to hold negative attitudes. The survey confirms the conventional wisdom that Arabs are largely disenchanted with the West, but it also suggests a number of important refinements. First, Arabs do not feel equally negatively toward all Western countries. Respondents recognize particular strengths of individual Western countries, and are willing, and even anxious, to engage with the West in specific areas.

Policymakers in the United States and the United Kingdom have reason to be concerned about the demographic and political trends in the region. The large, and ever-growing, youth population, the less educated, and those outside of elite circles hold the most hostile feelings toward those countries. Given the current demographic make-up of the Mashreq - with burgeoning young populations and limited upward mobility - relations are unlikely to improve in the absence of significant policy changes. Improving crosscultural dialogue and undertaking societal and cultural exchanges alone will not alleviate tensions.

The fundamental conclusion of "REVISITING THE ARAB STREET: RESEARCH FROM WITHIN" is that disapproval of Western foreign policy, most particularly as embodied by US policies in the Middle East, is at the heart of the fundamental disagreement between the West and the Arab World. This finding is consistent across the five Arab countries and for all demographic groups.

On p.13 of the full report, we learn this:

Arabs hold negative attitudes toward the West as a whole, but they are nevertheless much more positive toward France than they are toward the United States or the United Kingdom. For example, only 25% of national sample respondents in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt report feeling either “highly positive” or “moderately positive” toward the US and the UK as opposed to 57% who felt positively toward France... [A]s many as 75% of Syrians perceiv[ed] the US as “not at all positive”. An important exception emerges in Lebanon, where only 20% view the US negatively.

(Those results came from the answers to a question which apparently went something like: "How do you feel toward [western country X]: Highly positive, moderately positive, a but positive, or not positive at all?" This wasn't a "balanced" question in the same way that one asking "Do you feel very positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative, or very negative toward [country X]" In fact, it's impossible to break out the group who feel quite neutral to country X from that that feels negative to any degree toward it... "Not positive at all" is NOT the same thing as "negative"... )

Down on p.72 of the report (p.73 of the PDF file), there is a really fascinating table showing the proportion of respondents who categorized certain kinds of actions as "terrorist". Beneath it, there's a table showing the ways respondents characterized certain Arab/Islamic militant organizations. I can't reproduce both those whole tables here. But here are the parts of them that I found particularly interesting:

% labeling event as "terrorist":	Jordan	Syria	Leb.	Pal.	Egypt
Bulldozing by Israel of agricultural land and crops in West Bank and Gaza Strip	88	96	83	94	90
Attacks on Israeli civilians inside Israel	24	22	55	17	33
Attacks on Israeli military inside Israel	7	5	25	3	9
Attacks on US coalition forces in Iraq	18	9	28	9	14
Hizballah operations against Israel	10	3	16	2	7
% labeling group as as "legitimate resistance"/ "terrorist":
Hizbullah	84 / 3	96 / 1	75 / 12	92 / 1	80 / 3
Hamas	87 / 2	95 / 1	62 / 19	94 / 1	85 / 3
Al-Qaeda	67 / 11	8 / 40	18 / 54	70 / 7	41 / 31

To me, the three most interesting things about the figures there are:

(1) The high proportion of respondents in all countries labeling anti-property actions taken by Israel as "terrorist",

(2) The figure for the proportion of Lebanese labeling Hizbullah as a "legitimate resistance organization" (75%), which evidently must include a lot of Christians, as well as Muslims, and

(3) The identity of the country in which expressed support for Al-Qaeda's legitimacy is ways the lowest-- no, not Lebanon, but Syria!

I should note that I did not reproduce the figures, in the second half of the table I made there, for the numbers the CSS researchers reported as giving "indeterminate" responses on the status of the named organizations... For most organizations, those figures were very low. But for Al-Qaeda, they were notably high. I wonder if that was the "interviewer with the clipboard" effect at work there?

Finally, a little methodological rant here. I totally hate it when people use all the fancy graphicizing potentials in their software to produce those kinds of bar graphs that give the "impression" of solid bars. It adds nothing to the presentation, but detracts seriously from the reader's ability to "read" (or estimate) the number easily.

In fact, rather than presenting those horrible "solid-looking" bars it would be much more helpful all round if people would use a graph that runs lines across from some of the major intervals on the Y-axis-- like, in many of the cases in this report, 20%, 40%, 60%, etc... That would make the bar graph even easier to "read" still.

What is the point of the graph, after all? To communicate a data-set easily, or to show off the graph-drawer's command of some fancy software package? Grrr.