A front-page article in today's New York Times reports, "the fact reported by all Western travelers to the Middle East is the rage of the streets, and the corresponding spread of anti-Americanism. In a recent Gallup poll of nearly 10,000 Muslims in nine countries -- five of them Arab -- respondents overwhelmingly described the United States as 'ruthless, aggressive, conceited, arrogant, easily provoked, biased.' Saudi Arabia was among the countries where people registered the most negative views."
The full Gallup poll results are available online only to those who are willing to pay Gallup $1,250, a group that does not include the editor of Smartertimes.com. The Gallup Web site explains that "In possibly the most challenging project in Gallup's history, 10,000 people in nine predominantly Islamic countries were interviewed. In December 2001 and January 2002, researchers conducted hour-long, in-person interviews in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan and Morocco."
The reason the project was "challenging" is that it is tremendously difficult to get accurate measures of public opinion in unfree states, which is what most of these nine countries are. In some of these countries, people aren't used to voting or to being asked for their opinion. If the press in a country is controlled by the government and if opponents of the government line can be killed or thrown in jail, it is hard for people to form independent opinions. And if they have formed independent opinions, they tend to be reluctant to share them with strangers.
As a result, it's easy to misinterpret Arab and Muslim public opinion. This same front-page news article in today's Times reports, for instance, that "There is a widespread presumption that the administration wants to keep the Israel-Palestinian conflict on a back burner while it weighs its options on ousting Mr. Hussein, and there are those who see the timing of the Saudi statement as trying to forestall an American strike on Iraq. On this view, it would be harder to bash Mr. Hussein against the wishes of the Arabs if at the same time they were stretching an olive branch toward Israel."
That assumes "the Arabs" oppose ousting Saddam Hussein. In fact the Arabs who are leading the opposition to Saddam Hussein are eager to oust him, as are many of those Arabs who have been stuck under the boot of his brutal regime. The Arabs who oppose ousting him are the corrupt Saudi monarchs who are only afraid that if a free and democratic regime emerges in Iraq, the people of Saudi Arabia might hear about it and get their own ideas.
An article in the Week in Review section of today's New York Times makes the same error, reporting of Saudi Arabia, "Even more than the scourge of terror, the Palestinian plight has seized the conscience of the kingdom. Television is dominated by one-sided images of the Palestinians -- and none of Israelis -- as victims of violence. Sympathy for the cause of Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi-born terrorist, runs high, Saudi officials and academics say, not because the Saudis like terrorism, but because he has latched onto the Palestinian cause."
Well, this is a convenient explanation for the Saudi officials to offer, because it absolves the tyrannical and corrupt and failed Saudi regime of any responsibility for the unrest among its own people. The Times might ask which Arab dictator decides what images dominate on television. The passive construction -- "Television is dominated by" -- makes it sounds as if these images just appear on their own.