What Arabs Think (2)

I'd say that the most distressing part of the 2006 Zogby/University of Maryland poll of Arab public opinion is the first section, Global Perspectives. When asked which world leader outside their own country they admired most, Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah scored highest, with 14%, among people in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. (Lebanon participants could not select Nasrallah, under the rules.) Nasrallah's highest rating of 31% was in the UAE, where Dubai is striving to be the next Singapore of globalization. Overall, the next most-admired leaders were Chirac (8%), Ahmadinejad (4%), Chavez (3%) and Bin Laden (around 2%, it seems).
These figures tell me several things:
--Arabs don't put much faith in leadership. While Nasrallah is the highest-rated, his 14% isn't a resounding endorsement. Arabs are, perhaps understandably, disillusioned about leadership-- by the political ineffectiveness of their own leaders, by their inability to change those leaders and by the relative strength of leaders like Bush whose policies mainly embitter them. Arabs need to build more positive attitudes about leadership.
--Arabs nurse too much defeatism. Notice, as I'm sure you have, that the five top vote-getters vary dramatically from one another yet hold one thing in common: their pronounced opposition to American foreign policies. This has an unpleasant echo from the Nasser era about it, when the Arab masses rallied around a dictator who talked a big military game against the U.S. and Israel. If Arabs feel better when somebody like Nasrallah stands up to Israel, or Ahmadinejad when he defies America, great. But Arabs are never going to rise from their predicament if they don't start producing and following more leaders who are "for" and not just "against." Nasrallah wins kudos for having ended Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000. Yet why should he be a bigger hero after provoking Israel's destruction in Lebanon last summer than Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora, who has spent the last 20 or so years of his life trying to build Lebanon? Or than Sheikh Mohammed, the builder/dreamer of Dubai? Muslims have won the Nobel Peace Prize in three of the last four years, yet neither Shirin Ebadi, Mohammed ElBaradei nor Muhammad Yunus seemed to rate. When Arabs look beyond their region, why do they choose Chavez over, say, Georgia's Mikhail Saakashvili or Ukraine's Victor Yushchenko? Or Nelson Mandela or the Dalai Lama? Or even China's Hu Jintao? Or, for the sake of argument, Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad.
--Arabs not only view the U.S. negatively, as I mentioned in the previous post, they feel under siege by the U.S. When asked which world leader they most disliked, 38% of respondents named Bush, five times the number who named Israel's prime minister (i.e., Olmert got only 7%). When asked to identify the two countries that posed the biggest threat to them, 85% named Israel, 72% U.S. and only 11% Iran. Only 14% named the U.S. as a country that has "the most freedom and democracy for their people." Only 9% would choose the U.S. if they had to live in a foreign country.

--by Scott MacLeod/Cairo