Over and over we hear the refrain: “the world wants Obama”

The world, however, is mostly pretty stupid – or at least, that’s the tale of the poll:

Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, there is no consensus outside the United States that Islamist militants from al Qaeda were responsible, according to an international poll published Wednesday.

The survey of 16,063 people in 17 nations found majorities in only nine countries believe al Qaeda was behind the attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people in 2001.

U.S. officials squarely blame al Qaeda, whose leader Osama bin Laden has boasted of organizing the suicide attacks by his followers using hijacked commercial airliners.

On average, 46 percent of those surveyed said al Qaeda was responsible, 15 percent said the U.S. government, 7 percent said Israel and 7 percent said some other perpetrator. One in four people said they did not know who was behind the attacks.

A few years back, a poll showed a third of American Democrats thought as former “governor” Jesse Ventura does – that 9/11 was an inside job.  Perhaps the world shouldn’t feel so bad.

Not.

Respondents in the Middle East were especially likely to name a perpetrator other than al Qaeda, the poll found.

Israel was behind the attacks, said 43 percent of people in Egypt, 31 percent in Jordan and 19 percent in the Palestinian Territories. The U.S. government was blamed by 36 percent of Turks and 27 percent of Palestinians.

In Mexico, 30 percent cited the U.S. government and 33 percent named al Qaeda.

Oddly, it was in the least “developed” parts of the world that Al Quaeda was most-blamed.  Could it be because in places like Nigeria, Al Quaeda isn’t an abstraction?

Or is it because they aren’t exposed to the western news media? 

I’ll take “all of the above”. 

(Via Gary @ TVM)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/09/2360240.htm?section=world

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 4:56 am and is filed under Campaign '08, World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.