Media, Education and Anti-Americanism in the Muslim World

A merica has an image problem. Only 1 percent of people surveyed in June 2003 in Jordan or the Palestinian Authority expressed a favorable opinion of the United States. Favorability ratings elsewhere in the Middle East were almost all below 30 percent. Osama bin Laden was among the top three leaders most often trusted to “do the right thing” by survey respondents in Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan and the Palestinian Authority (Pew Research Center, 2003). Responses to similar questions by Americans reveal that the feeling is mutual: in a recent poll, only 24 percent of Americans expressed favorable views of Muslim countries overall (USA Today, 2002). Moreover, this antagonism is not only driven by opposed interests or disagreement about the moral or ethical meaning of the events that have transpired. It also reflects radically different, and often distorted, perceptions of the facts themselves. In results we report below, 78 percent of respondents in seven Muslim countries said that they do not believe that a group of Arabs carried out the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. Likewise, according to the Washington Post (2003), 69 percent of Americans believe it is “somewhat” or “very” likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attacks, despite the absence of any evidence to that effect. In September 2003, 20 percent of Americans said that Iraq had used chemical or biological weapons against American troops, again clearly contradicting the available evidence (Kull, Ramsey, Subias, Lewis and Warf, 2003).