Who’s The Happiest One Of All?

Martin Peretz
The New Republic
29 July '10

Posted before Shabbat

This is one of those slightly hokey surveys that measures the happiness of nations. Done by the Gallup World Poll and written up for Forbes by Francesca Levy, its results are not entirely surprising.

Rich countries generally do better than others, although Saudi Arabia ranks 58th just ahead of Pakistan. Almost three times as many Saudis are “struggling” than “thriving.” On the other hand, the United Arab Emirates (which is a country made up of wealthy scions and resident ex-pats) and Kuwait register respectably 20th and 23rd. So how about Egypt? It shares the 115th ranking with Zimbabwe, India, Morocco, Syria and...Afghanistan! Just ahead of People’s China which, at 125, leads a cohort of Congo (Brazzaville), Sudan and Djibouti.

Where did the Palestinian Territories show up? At the 96th spot, ahead of Turkey 103. And I thought that the Palestinians were suffering, really suffering. Of course, suffering is also a subjective category. How could you not be suffering with Israel right next door but checking in at 8th spot, just in front of Australia and Switzerland, right behind Canada. Moreover, these numbers must also take into account the Israeli Arabs whose unhappy striving surely was not ignored.

The top five are Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, the paradigmatic welfare states. Then Costa Rica and New Zealand. And, yes, Canada and Israel. This is a wonderful world. I wish the U.S. were more fully in it.

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The dishonesty of Dalia Mogahed

Elder of Ziyon
07 April '10

Dalia Mogahed is an adviser to President Obama who was one of the two people behind a poll on worldwide Muslim attitudes in 2008 that spawned a very flawed book, "Who Speaks for Islam?"

She responds to a Lee Smith piece in Tablet that portrays her as very influential in the White House and also criticizes the poll. While I am qualified to comment on her influence with Obama, the other part of her response is interesting to me.

She cuts and pastes from a Gallup FAQ about her book:

In the book Who Speaks for Islam?, we define the "politically radicalized" as respondents who A) answered a "5" when asked to rate the extent that 9/11 could be morally justified on a 5-point scale, where "1" is "cannot be justified at all" and "5" is "completely justifiable," and B) said they view the United States unfavorably. A population-weighted average of 7% fit these criteria. We labeled those who said 9/11 could not be completely justified as "moderates." We further broke this group down into those who were pro-United States and those who were anti-United States.

The decision as to where to break out the "politically radicalized" from the rest was data-driven. It was based on several analyses of where the data clustered for a natural breaking point. The analyses showed that the people who responded with a "5" (completely justifiable) to the question on the justifiability of 9/11 as a group were distinctly different from the groups who responded with a "1", "2", "3" or "4." The idea here is not that we are judging who or what a "moderate" or "radical" is, but rather assigning labels to statistical groups that we clearly define.

The term "moderate" is more of a placeholder label than a value judgment. It is similar to calling one clustering in the data "group A" and another "group B." We simply used labels that a broad audience can easily understand and remember.

This is how Gallup justified calling people who thought that the 9/11 attacks were "mostly" or "partially" justified as "moderate."

It is the bolded sentence that is dishonest. Mogahed and Gallup are claiming that the word "moderate"is not a value judgment, and that they could have just as easily called the groups "group A" and "group B."

(Read full post)
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Americans Love Israel Even More Than You Think

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
02 March '10

International relations isn’t a popularity contest. But public opinion polls can be useful in countering myths and examining the impact of policymaker, elite, and media campaigns on the masses.

Which brings us to Gallup’s latest poll measuring how Americans feel about different countries. The more one examines the results, the more amazing they are. Americans two favorites are, not surprisingly, fellow English-speakers Canada and the United Kingdom. Then come—Americans are very forgiving—two former enemies, Germany and Japan.

And next on the list is Israel. Even the basic numbers—67 favorable, 25 percent unfavorable—are impressive. But that’s only the beginning. Around 10 percent of Americans don’t like anybody, and only one-fourth of those 25 percent nay-sayers on Israel, that is 6 percent, are really hostile.

In other words, the percentage of Americans who hate Israel is only 6 percent and the number who single out Israel for partly unfavorable views among other popular countries adds about 10 percent more.

And since 10 percent of Americans say they like Iran (85 percent don’t), having only a bit more than that number really disliking Israel isn’t very impressive.

After 20 years or so of intensive media criticism, hostility on campuses, double standards, and controversy that’s nothing short of remarkable.

(Read full post)

Related: Joyce Kaufman. The 7 Reasons to Support Israel
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The Obama-American public Israeli disconnect

Yoram Ettinger
Op-Ed/JPost
27 February '10

A recent Gallop poll shows that Israel maintains its good standing with the US public, despite Obama’s ‘even-handed’ approach toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, his attempts to force Israel into sweeping concessions, and in defiance of the US media and academia.

The findings of the February 19, 2010 Gallup poll put President Barack Obama at odds with the US public, when it comes to attitudes toward the Jewish state, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Arabs, Muslims and Islamic terrorism.

For example, Israel maintains its traditional spot among the five most favored nations by 67 percent of the US public, despite Obama’s “even-handed” approach toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, in spite of his attempts to force Israel into sweeping concessions, and in defiance of the US “elite” media and academia.

On the other hand, the Palestinian Authority is ranked – along with Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan – at the bottom of the list, favored by only 20% of the US public.

According to an August 10, 2009 Rasmussen poll, Israel is ranked as the third most favorable ally (70%), preceded only by Canada and Britain. The low regard toward Egypt (39%) and Saudi Arabia (23%) demonstrates that Americans remain skeptical – at least since 9/11 – of Arabs and Muslims, even as these countries are portrayed by the media and the administration as supposedly moderate and pro-American.

Moreover, only 21% of adult Americans expect that the US relationship with the Muslim world will improve in a year, while 25% expect that it will get worse.

APPARENTLY, US public attitude towards Arabs and Muslims has hardly been impacted by Obama’s highly-publicized outreach to Muslims, as demonstrated by his speeches at Turkey’s National Assembly in April (“…the Islamic faith has done so much to shape the world, including my own country…”), at Cairo University in June (“Islam has always been a part of America’s story…”) and at the UN General assembly in September (“America has acted unilaterally, without regard for the interests of others…”).

(Read full article)
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