[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Redux

Uh OH...a poll?

You obviously failed to read to the end of the article, and hence the point of it. This is like shooting Redux Fish in a barrel.

Opinion polls do not mean a hill of beans in cultures rendered incoherent by despotism, denial, rage, and irrational religion.The Pew Research Center for People and the Press, directed by Andrew Kohut, has led the research effort to prop up these pernicious myths: The trick is to employ polling methods oblivious to the cultural pathologies raging in Arab and Muslim societies. What does “public opinion” mean under Islamic regimes that outlaw political parties, control the media, underwrite hate speech in sermons and school textbooks, persecute religious minorities, and torture political dissidents? Pew researchers remain unburdened by these complicated realities.

The Pew Research Center, advised by no less a partisan than former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, continues to make the now incomprehensible claim that “the unilateralist U.S. foreign policy” of George Bush was the engine of anti-Americanism the world over. In a summary report of its work over the last eight years, Pew researchers concluded: “In the view of much of the world, the United States has played the role of bully in the school yard, throwing its weight around with little regard for others’ interests.” Of Pew’s 25 surveys conducted since 2001, America’s image problem was designated “the central, unmistakable finding.”

The actual unmistakable finding, confirmed by the resiliency of anti-Americanism in the era of Obama, is that opinion polls do not mean a hill of beans in cultures rendered incoherent by despotism, denial, rage, and irrational religion. Instead, such surveys merely allow partisans to use foreign narrators to voice their private grievances. These researchers surely realize that countless Arab and Muslim leaders are devoted to disseminating a perversely distorted image of the United States. Yet they carry on, blithely unconcerned that the abnormalities of Islamist societies—where the suicide bomber is a sanctified symbol of martyrdom—might represent an assault on the moral norms of the democratic West.

A more honest approach to polling could help us better understand America’s influence in the world. It might suggest how the ideals of equality, freedom, government by consent, religious liberty—the core doctrines of the American creed—pose a threat to despots and religious demagogues. That would require researchers, however, to suspend their agendas and begin asking tough, open-ended questions to more diverse audiences.