Islamism and Antisemitism. Preliminary Evidence on Their Relationship from Cross-National Opinion Data


Islamism and Antisemitism. Preliminary Evidence on Their Relationship from Cross-National Opinion Data
Download
Author: Tausch, Arno
Journal: Social Evolution & History. Volume 15, Number 2 / September 2016

ABSTRACT

What do we really know about mass support for Islamism? And what is its connection to antisemitism? Our analysis of these questions is based on promax factor analytical studies based on openly available cross-national survey data. First, we analyze the determinants of what led representative global World Values Survey (WVS) global Muslim interview partners to reject to have a Jewish neighbor, which is the only available WVS item to measure antisemitism. We also identify the extent of relationships between antisemitism, the economic and social situation, religion data, and opinions on terrorism among global Muslim publics based on the global Pew Research Centre surveys. Finally, we re-evaluate Arab Barometer survey data on ‘moderate Islamism’ and its relationship to antisemitism. All our new quantitative evidence supports the hypothesis developed in this essay from the literature that Islamism is deeply connected to antisemitism. Our data also indicate that Muslim dissatisfaction and dissent with society, often mentioned as the drivers of Islamism, are in fact connected to Muslim secularism and a distance from Islamism. Channeling this dissent in secular left- and right-wing protest parties would be an important future task in the stabilization of Arab and Muslim democracies.

BACKGROUND

The comparative analysis of international opinion surveys has become an important field of studies in international social science (Davidov et al. 2011). Without question, the assessment of public opinion among larger publics is a vital element in any fight against terrorism, and not just against Islamist terrorism (Ayalon 2002). But hard core analyses on religious values and terrorism, based on comparative international opinion surveys, are still rather scarce (Altemeyer and Hunsberger 2004; Blaydes and Linzer 2010; Ciftсi 2010; Kostenko et al. 2014; Spierings 2014; Tessler 2002, 2004; Tessler and Gao 2005; Tessler and Robins 2007; Yeşilada and Noordijk 2010; Zussman 2014).

The discipline of comparative research on religions (Küng 2002; Sacks 2014) can be an important source of additional information in such research endeavors. Also, social scientists themselves increasingly lay the groundwork for such comparative analyses of global religions on their own (Juergensmeyer et al. 2013; Röhrich 2004, 2010). But these attempts as yet did not apply advanced statistical analyses to the openly available World Values Survey data.

Antisemitism, in accordance with one of the most authoritative sources on the subject (Heinemann 2007) originally was a term coined in 1879, from the Greek ἁντί – anti, and Σημ – Semite by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr to designate the then-current anti-Jewish campaigns in Europe. The word ‘Antisemitism’ soon came into general use as a term denoting all forms of hostility manifested toward the Jews throughout history.

The Anti-Defamation League (2014), in the largest-ever global survey of antisemitism, starts out from the assumption that antisemitism is given when a respondent consents to at least six out of the following eleven statements, thus building on a very large body of scholarship on the subject and also taking into account the contemporary Islamist adaptions of antisemitism (ADL 2014; Heinemann et al. 2007; Kaplan and Small 2006; Lebl 2013; Mansur 2015; Paz 2015; Röhrich 2004; Tibi 2007, 2012, 2015; Werbner 2013; Wippermann 1983; Wistrich 1991, 2004, 2007, 2010):

1) Jews are more loyal to Israel [than to the country/the countries they live in];

2) Jews have too much power in international financial markets;

3) Jews have too much control over global affairs;

4) Jews think they are better than other people;

5) Jews have too much control over the global media;

6) Jews are responsible for most of the world wars;

7) Jews have too much power in the business world;

8) Jews do not care what happens to anyone but their own kind;

9) people hate Jews because of the way the Jews behave;

10) Jews have too much control over the United States government;

11) Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.

In attempting to define the relationship between Islamism and antisemitism, we also should ask ourselves what is the place of antisemitism among other factors in the rise of Islamism. As Heinemann et al. (2007) correctly emphasize, the campaign to identify Zionism with racism, which reached its apogee in 1975 with the resolution at the UN equating the two, certainly played a major role in it. As Heinemann emphasizes, at the end of the 1970s, mass publications such as the Egyptian Akhbār al-Yawm articles praising Hitler's attitude to the Jews were published, quoting the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and using stereotyped descriptions of Jews as controlling the wealth of the world, as exploiters and usurers, as a morally defective community. Under the influence of Islamist thinkers such as Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) (Bergesen 2008; Qutb 1990, 2000; Qutb and Algar 2006; Qutb, Salahi, and Shamis 1979), at that date the idea was first proposed that the Jews are the enemies of Islam from its inception; an independent Jewish political existence would relinquish territory within the ‘house of Islam’ (Dār al-Islam). Both the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood as well as the Iranian Khomeinite Shiʿa movement took up the virulent antisemitism, so characteristic of the works of Sayyid Qutb (Ganji 2013).

In this context, the next question arising in this context is what is so specific in Islamist antisemitism compared to that in the West and the former Communist countries and what leads to such differences in its forms and outcomes. With Heinemann et al. 2007; Kaplan and Small 2006; Lebl 2013; Mansur 2015; Paz 2015; Tibi 2007, 2012, 2015; Werbner 2013; Wippermann 1983; and Wistrich 1991, 2004, 2007, 2010 we would contend that Arab antisemitism was influenced by European anti-Semitic literature (mainly French) published in Arabic in the second half of the nineteenth century. Anti-Semitic themes and arguments were systematically developed by Arab propaganda as a weapon against the Jewish population in Palestine during the Mandate period (1917–1948) and even more so against the newly created State of Israel (Heinemann et al. 2007).

The vehemence of anti-Semitic literature in Arabic has, as Heinemann with co-authors maintain, no parallel in the post-World War II era. The infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion and their ‘concept’ of a ‘Jewish world conspiracy,’ was the main theme adopted by the Arabian antisemitism from the European antisemitism after the 1920s. In this context, we also cannot avoid the question what are the historical roots of the Islamist antisemitism? As pointed out correctly by Heinemann, the Quran contains the fundamental notion of the ‘peoples of the book’ referring to Christianity and Judaism, and that Islam was not interested in spiritual propaganda, and not in conquering souls. The Jews received a special status combining subjection and protection. Heinemann et al. (2007) voice the hypothesis that a source of early antisemitism in Islam might have been influenced by Byzantine traditions. In all this, the prescriptions of ritual purity and dietary laws, which united Jews and Muslims, as well as the observance of circumcision were a unifying element between Judaism and Islam in the Middle Ages. As Heinemann et al. (2007) correctly emphasize, the Jewish migration until the modern era usually was from Christian to Islamic countries, such as the exile of thousands and thousands of Sephardic Jews from Spain in the Ottoman Empire in 1492. The worst incidents of persecution of Jews by Muslims took place in Yemen in 1697 and in Iran in 1839 (Heinemann et al. 2007).

The final point which we should raise briefly in this background section is the question how does antisemitism correspond to different doctrines in Islam. Tibi (2015) emphasized that while Judeophobia is a hatred and prejudice, antisemitism is a genocidal ideology that identifies the Jews as evil and calls for their eradication. This genocidal sentiment did never exist in classical Islam. Tibi argues that the story of antisemitism in the Middle East exists in two segments, one is secular (pan-Arab nationalism), the other is religious-fundamentalist (Islamism). In terms of the history of ideas, the Islamization of antisemitism can again be traced back to the work of Sayyid Qutb, the mastermind of Islamist ideology (Bergesen 2008). Among the Islamist movements of today, the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas cultivates antisemitism in its extremist form, fully subscribing the antisemitism adapted to Islamism by Qutb.

Just as in the 1930s, today radicalized murderers kill Jews. Today, the murderers are Islamists. The Paris and Copenhagen attacks in 2015 and all Islamist attacks ever since painfully remind us that the relationship between Islamism and antisemitism hitherto has not been sufficiently dealt with in cross-national opinion research. The Prime Minister of the State of Israel, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, recently and correctly reminded the world that ‘Israel is being attacked by the same forces attacking Europe, and just as Israel stands with Europe, so too Europe must stand with Israel’ and that the Paris attacks in January, 2015 clearly demonstrate the ‘disdain of radical Islam for the values we hold dear’ (Reuters 2015; Office of the Prime Minister, the State of Israel 2015; Jerusalem Post 2015). Published empirical studies on Islamism and Islamist radicalism, relying on international opinion surveys, have hitherto ignored the anti-Semitic dimension of this movement. And since the publication of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) study on attitudes and opinions toward Jews in more than 100 countries around the world there is really no excuse for cross-national opinion research to ignore this subject. The above mentioned ADL survey, based on 53,100 total interviews among citizens aged 18 and over in 101 countries and the Palestinian Territories in the West Bank & Gaza analyzed the above mentioned negative stereotypes (eleven stereotypes; if respondents consented to six out of eleven statements they were considered to hold anti-Semitic attitudes). The overall ADL GLOBAL 100 Index Score is 26 per cent of global respondents (population weighted figures). This makes over one billion (1000 million) antisemites around the globe. In the world regions, the results are as follows (weighted percentages):

  • Middle East and North Africa (MENA): 74 per cent;

  • Eastern Europe: 34 per cent;

  • Western Europe: 24 per cent;

  • Sub-Saharan Africa: 23 per cent;

  • Asia: 22 per cent;

  • Americas: 19 per cent;

  • Oceania: 14 per cent.

The interplay between religion, place of residence and antisemitism reveals interesting patterns as well: while only less than one-fifth of Christians in the Americas and Oceania are anti-Semitic, the share of Christians with anti-Semitic attitudes in Western Europe is already 25 per cent, in Eastern Europe it is already 35 per cent, and in the MENA region, it is a staggering 64 per cent. The data for Muslims in these regions correspond to a similar pattern: while only less than one-third of Muslims in the Americas and Oceania are anti-Semitic, the share of Muslims with anti-Semitic attitudes in Eastern Europe is 20 per cent, while in the MENA region, it is 75 per cent.

The ADL survey, for the first time in global social science literature, also measured Muslim anti-Semitic attitudes in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK. Based on the available population statistics for the European overall population and reliable estimates of the European Muslim population1 we come to the conclusion that on a population-weighted basis, 54.3 per cent of the total Muslim population of 14.9 million people in these six key West European countries, harbor anti-Semitic attitudes (consenting to at least six of the eleven criteria, used by the ADL survey). Anti-Semitic stereotypes by Muslims in these countries are substantially higher than among the total national population in these six key countries of Western Europe, though lower than the corresponding figures of 75 per cent for Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The margin of error for Muslims in each country was +/– 9.8 per cent, and for the combined Western European Muslim oversample for all six countries was +/– 4.0 per cent.

Most prevalent was the belief that Jews have too much power in international financial markets – an anti-Jewish opinion affirmed by some 70 per cent of Western European Muslims.

The ADL also highlights that on most conspiracy-related statements, scores of European and MENA Muslims showed little difference. However, on negative statements about the Jewish character’ (e.g., ‘people hate Jews because of the way they behave’ and ‘Jews think they are better than other people’) European Muslims scored substantially lower than MENA Muslims.

The antisemitism index scores were extremely high for Muslims across all six of the European countries sampled, with the lowest level recorded in France:

  • Belgium: 68 per cent of Muslims harbor anti-Semitic attitudes, compared to 21 per cent overall; 3.5 per cent Muslim population share;

  • Spain: 62 per cent, compared to 29 per cent overall; 2.5 per cent Muslim population share;

  • Germany: 56 per cent, compared to 16 per cent overall; 3.7 per cent Muslim population share;

  • Italy: 56 per cent, compared to 29 per cent overall; 1.7 per cent Muslim population share;

  • United Kingdom: 54 per cent, compared to 12 per cent overall; 2.7 per cent Muslim population share;

  • France: 49 per cent, compared to 17 per cent overall; 7.5 per cent Muslim population share.

The implications of these data for the European Union and its future fights against terrorism are manifold and can be easily calculated from the ADL statistics and the relevant population size figures from Eurostat and Nationmaster, mentioned above. Of the 506.8 million inhabitants of the European Union, we have data on antisemitism for 499.5 million people. Data for Cyprus, Luxembourg, Malta, and Slovakia are missing. In this sub-sample of a hypothetical EU-24, 132.1 million people hold anti-Semitic views, which are 26.4 per cent of this total EU-24 population. We can thus indeed very safely assume that some one in four EU inhabitants holds anti-Semitic views.

It is now interesting to analyze the role of the European Muslim population, to be estimated for the EU-28 at 19.1 million people, in this process. The ADL survey data on antisemitism of the Muslim population are available only for six countries, which host 14.9 of the 19.1 million Muslim inhabitants of the European Union, and 329.4 of its 506.8 million total inhabitants.

For these six countries, mentioned above, we now can easily calculate from the ADL, and Eurostat figures a population-weighted rate of 24.3 per cent of antisemitism, which is not very much different from the total of the EU-28. The European Muslims are characterized by antisemitism rate of 54.3 per cent, i.e. one in two Muslims in Europe is anti-Semitic. Out of a total Muslim population of 14.9 million people in these six countries, 8.1 million people must be considered as anti-Semitic, while the total number of antisemites from the total population is almost 80 million people. The total share of Muslims in the overall population of these six countries is just 4.5 per cent, while the 8.1-percent share of Muslim Antisemites in the total number of almost 80 million antisemites in these six countries is a staggering 10.1 per cent. While in some countries, ‘Islamization’ of antisemitism did not yet progress as fast as in other countries; the figures emerging from this exercise are alarming indeed.

Table 1

Islamization’ of antisemitism

Muslim share in total country

Antisemitism

Spain

4.7 %

Italy

7.3 %

France

9.5 %

Germany

10.6 %

Belgium

14.3 %

United Kingdom

30.1 %

With all the pressing global need to confront ISIL/ISIS, for example, there are as yet even hardly any simple aggregate opinion survey data available except for the ones published by a Qatar based Arab Think Tank, the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies (ACRPS)’ (2015), let alone multivariate analyses about the underlying causes. The ACRPS survey data are freely available from the Internet, and arrive at the astonishing conclusion that 24 per cent of the adult population in the Palestinian Territories, 10 per cent or above of the population in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, of the Syrian refugees and in Tunisia support ISIL/ISIS, while in Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon the support rates are below 10 per cent. But what are the real drivers of terror support, and what are the underlying structures of opinion, contributing to terror?

All our indicators point to the direction that antisemitism (Heinemann et al. 2007) of the so-called ‘moderate Islamists’ makes the spread of the ideology of brutal terrorism possible and even fashionable in the first place (Wallstreet Journal 2015). From the little evidence to be gathered from survey research, we try to illustrate this point with our results from our own new statistical evaluations of the open and available data.

The Israeli scholar and high-ranking retired analytical intelligence officer, Reuven Paz (2015) correctly maintained some time ago that the issues of the interpretation of religion, culture, and also gender relations play an all-important part in the Jihadist ideology ever since Sayyid Qutb's integral and negative perception of Western culture (see also Bergesen 2008; Altemeyer and Hunsberger 2004; Juergensmeyer et al. 2013; Lebl 2010, 2013, 2014a, 2014b; Tibi 2007, 2012). Without confronting these issues and neatly looking the other way in an attitude of ‘political correctness’, unwilling to confront core assumptions of the Islamist ideology, research will produce only very biased and limited results.

Perhaps, the omni-presence of ‘speech codes’ / political correctness is indeed a reality in Europe nowadays; in the press, and also in social sciences, which hinders many politicians, opinion leaders, and also researchers to say that Islamism is above all antisemitism. To proclaim that Israel is a state sponsor’ of ‘international terrorism’ while it would be inappropriate to call Islamist terrorism ‘Islamist’ has become the ‘logic’ of an entire wave of peer-reviewed publications in the field of so-called ‘critical terrorism research’ (Jackson 2006, 2007a, 2007b; Gunning and Jackson 2011).

This kind of approach to the problems is in stark contrast to the evidence, produced by government-sponsored think tank security experts around the globe, who increasingly become aware of the devastating nature of global Islamist terrorism and its thousands of victims each month, from Nigeria to South-East Asia and also, increasingly, in Europe (Institute for Economics and Peace 2014; Neumann 2014). Such robust empirical studies, like the one prepared by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence and BBC World Service, document that now there are at least 5,042 monthly deaths from Islamist political violence in late 2014 on a global level (Institute for Economics and Peace 2014; Neumann 2014).

Recently, one could also observe a shameful silence in the Western world about the recent terrible attack by the Islamist Somali Al Shabab militias against Garissa University College in Kenya, where 147 students and staff were killed (BBC 2015). This pogrom against Christian students, who were singled out and shot, led to no significant wave of solidarity demonstrations in the Western world comparable in scale with the recent demonstrations against Israeli policies in Gaza.

Amidst all this, we share with Mark Heller (2015), another leading Israeli security expert, the idea that it is time to seriously analyze what sectors of Muslim society that support extremism think and do, and why they think in such a way, while important and far more numerous other segments of Muslim society oppose radicalism and terrorism and even combat it. Given the real dearth of the debate in Europe making use of existing and freely available opinion survey research instruments from many countries around the world like the World Values Survey (WVS; Inglehart and Baker 2000),2 the PEW data3 or the Arab Barometer Project,4 we should conclude that future debates about Islamist terrorism should above all be data-driven (Tessler 2002).

For us, it is wrong to define radical Islamism only in terms of the identification with outright support for the immediate bomb-throwing terror, while neglecting the underlying ideological and dangerous radicalism and also ongoing radicalization of such organizations as Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood (Lebl 2014a, 2014b) or the Turkish Milli Görüs (Vielhaber 2012), which both start, like the most radicalized factions of Islamist terrorism, from the intense hatred of Jews and Freemasons and Western civilization as such, and which for many on both sides of the Atlantic appear as ‘moderate Islamists’ and worthy partners of dialogue, while in reality they provide the fertile ground from which the armed terrorist groups only can develop (Lebl 2013).

THE PECCATA NOSTRA THEORY:5 ISLAMISM – A FRUIT OF ‘OUR (WESTERN) SINS’?

Without hesitation, one can say that Mark Tessler's research on our subject is the leading research in the field (Tessler 2002, 2004; Tessler and Gao 2005; Tessler and Robins 2007). A simple glance at ‘google scholar’ quotation metrics will tell us just how often his approach is now being debated in the scholarly literature on the subject (Google Scholar 2015). Tessler's main variables, measuring Islamism are:

  • attitudes toward democracy;

  • attitudes toward Western culture and society;

  • support for terrorism (9/11 attacks, etc.).

But in disagreement with Tessler we understand Islamism in a much wider sense. With Tibi (Tibi 2007, 2012) one can even say that Islamism is religionised politics, based on the Arabic term din-wa-dawla (unity of state and religion) under a system of mandated shari’a law. Tibi also argues that antisemitism of Islamism is a vital component of the ideology and very different from both the old Islamic Judeophobia and modern pan-Arab nationalist antisemitism. Islamist contemporary antisemitism now assumes the so-called ‘Jewish conspiracy against Islam since 622.’ Thus, our new research strategy, focusing on such a wider understanding of Islamism, seems to be justified.

Tessler's widely received empirical analysis, based on data on Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, and Jordan, came to the conclusion that Islamic orientations and attachments have at most a very limited impact on views about democracy. Strong Islamic attachments do not discourage support for democracy. Tessler and Robbins (2007) also underline that there is no support for the hypothesis that personal religious involvement, support for the platform of political Islam, opposition to Western values have an important effect on terror support (see also Kurzman and Naqvi 2010). The real drivers of terror support, Tessler believes, are the levels of low confidence in domestic political institutions and the negative assessments of the US foreign policy. Tessler also, at times, seems to blame the State of Israel and its policies for the rise of global Islamism (Tessler 2004).

More recent research, however, has begun to question this consensus:

  • We mention here first of all Blades and Linzer (2010) with their empirical research on Muslim anti-Americanism as a domestic, elite-led phenomenon that intensifies when there is greater competition between Islamist and secular-nationalist political factions within a country.

  • Spierings (2014) with his World Values Survey based on the study on Arab countries, linked denominational belonging (affiliation), commitment (religiosity), orthodoxy, Muslim political attitudes, and individual-level political Islamism to the support for democracy and politico-religious tolerance. In Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia, tolerance levels are remarkably lower than democratic support; and political Islamist views strongly affect tolerance negatively.

  • A major recent Turkish study also highlights such aspects. Cifti (2010) underlines that in ten Muslim-majority countries; perceptions of gender equality are strongly associated with democratic orientations. Political Islamism, measured by the WVS item: Politicians who do not believe in God are unfit for public office,’ negatively affects the democracy indicators (diffuse and specific support for democracy).

  • A team of Russian authors, Veronika Kostenko, Pavel Kuzmichev, and Eduard Ponarin also should be briefly mentioned here (Kostenko et al. 2014). Their paper analyzes the relationship between the support of democracy and attitudes to human rights: in particular, support for gender equality in the countries covered by the first wave of the Arab Barometer project. In the Middle East 80 per cent of democracy supporters equal only 17 per cent of those who understand, value, and support democracy as they do in the Western world.

DATA AND METHODOLOGY

Violent antisemitism is the common denominator of all kinds of Jihadist terrorism. Data from the ADL 100 Index survey are (not yet) available for multivariate analysis by the global scientific publics. To use the World Values Survey data with their item on the rejection of a Jewish neighbor is very crude and constitutes only a second best solution, but realistically speaking, research has currently no alternative to gain at least a fraction of knowledge on this important subject. So, we analyzed the existing global social scientific data about the determinants of what led representative global World Values Survey Muslim interview partners to reject to have a Jewish neighbor. We performed a promax factor analysis of these data and we can show how Muslim antisemitism is related to other available indicators of Islamism.

Re-analyzing the global PEW data base, we also identify the extent of possible relationships between antisemitism, the economic and social situation, religion data, opinions on politicians closely to be identified with terrorism (Osama Ben Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) and opinions on terrorist anti-Semitic organizations (Hamas and Hezbollah) among the totally available global Muslim representative samples.

Finally, we briefly re-evaluated the very same data as used by Tessler in his path-breaking and often being referred articles – the Arab Barometer survey, edition 1. While using these same data as Tessler, we reach very different results, and above all, we include the dimension of opinions on Israel.

Our analysis is well within the tradition of factor analytical studies based on openly available World Values Survey data (see Inglehart and Baker 2000; Tausch and Moaddel 2009; Tausch et al. 2014; furthermore: Blalock 1972; Gorsuch 1983; Harman 1976; IBM 2011; Jolliffe 2002; Rummel 1970; Tabachnick and Fidell 2001). Our research design features not only the analysis of the underlying factors, but also the correlation between the mathematically derived factors. For this reason, our chosen factor analytical routine is the promax factor analytical model, which is more and more given preference in mainstream methodological literature (see Finch 2006; Yeşilada and Noordijk 2010). Our data and statistical models and procedures are all publicly available. Any researcher around the globe should be able to reproduce our results. Throughout our research, we used IBM SPSS XXI software, widely implemented at academic research centers and universities (IBM 2011).

ANTISEMITISM – A KEY TOWARDS UNDERSTANDING ISLAMISM

Since the original data (World Values Survey) and methods (SPSS XXI) are all freely available, we concentrate here on a synthesis of the results.

The World Values Survey measures antisemitism by the simple rejection rates of a Jewish neighbor in national surveys. We are well aware that this is highly questionable to say the least, in view of the vast available global literature on antisemitism (The Coordination Forum 2015; Bauer 1993; Lebl 2013; Wistrich 1991, 2004, 2007, 2010).

For the 13,881 representative Muslim individuals in the World Values Survey with available data, we are presented with the following rates of Muslim antisemitism (rejection of a Jewish neighbor).

Table 2

Rates of Muslim antisemitism

Russian Federation

8 %

South Africa

14 %

Albania

18 %

Bangladesh

19 %

Macedonia

20 %

Kyrgyzstan

23 %

Bosnia and Herzegovina

28 %

Uganda

32 %

Nigeria

41 %

India

64 %

Iran

75 %

Egypt

84 %

Iraq

90 %

The variables from the World Values Survey data base, which we used in our analysis, are to be seen in the Appendix (factor loadings with the variables of the model). Our results first of all show the significant partial correlation coefficients6 of antisemitism (rejecting Jewish neighbors) with other Islamism indicators, like distrust in the international political and economic order, endorsement of the veil, the call for the interpretation of laws by religious authorities, and longing for a strong leader and a redistributive democracy, the endorsement of inequality by the Islamists notwithstanding. Islamism, seen in such a way, is the quest to occupy the commanding positions of the state class (Elsenhans 1991).

Muslim antisemitism is significantly linked to the idea that only politicians believing in Allah are fit for public office, that co-education at universities is not permissible and that there is a cultural invasion of the Muslim world by the West. Dissatisfaction with people in national political office negatively correlates with antisemitism, throwing overboard the hypothesis that Muslim antisemitism has to do with political dissent against the rulers. Our data indicate that Muslim dissent is connected to Muslim secularism and a distance to Islamism. Channeling this dissent in secular left- and right-wing protest parties would be an important future task for the stabilization of Muslim democracies.

There are six factors in this model which can be reasonably interpreted according to the standard statistical benchmark of the Eigenvalue, which must be equal or greater than 1.0:

  • older generation;

  • Islamism and antisemitism;

  • distrust of the army and the press;

  • urban upper class;

  • secularism;

  • urban women.

In all, the model explains 61.473 per cent of the total variance. In looking at the relevant Muslim World Values Survey data, it also appears that right-wing and left-wing extremists show higher anti-Semitic feelings than Muslims with a middle-of-the road political orientation. Irrespective of political ideology, average rates of antisemitism (0 = no rejection of Jewish neighbors; 1 = rejection) are about double the size of antisemitism in the global population.

The Muslim World Values Survey data also show that Muslim left wingers are more extreme in their rejection of Jewish neighbors than the Muslim global right. A reasonable explanation for this could be that in the Muslim cultural environment, left-wingers want to prove that they, too, are ‘good Arabs/Muslims’ and that they, too, intensely hate Israel and hate the Jews, their secularism and left-wing ideology notwithstanding. For any close observer of contemporary political developments, our statements will not be a novelty – too clear are the facts about a rising extreme left-wing antisemitism around the globe, greatly contributing to the current surge of global Antisemitism.7, 8, 9 An important and growing current in contemporary social science seems to look the other way, when Molotov cocktails are thrown against synagogues, and seems to concentrate all its energies instead on such phenomena as the alleged Israeli aggression against ‘Palestine’ in relationship to gay and lesbian rights in Israeli society (Puar 2011), or the alleged racist constructions of Judaism (Werbner 2013).

Kaplan and Small (2006) in their study could already show that extreme criticisms of Israel (e.g., Israel is an apartheid state, the Israel Defense Forces deliberately are targeting Palestinians), coupled with extremist policy proposals (e.g., boycott of Israeli academics and institutions, divestment from companies doing business with Israel), are indeed motivated by nothing else than blatant anti-Semitic sentiments.

Fig. 1 Antisemitism and self-declared position on the political spectrum

Interestingly enough, the ‘Islamism and Antisemitism’ dimension also suggests that respondents from an urban environment with an ideological distance to the existing international order, symbolized by the United Nations, a high importance assigned to Allah in one's life, but at the same time a certain distance to the established Mosques, often under the de-facto control of the respective national governments, a lower level of formal education and a high confidence in the press are the ones most likely to combine antisemitism and the Islamist proposition that people who do not believe in Allah are not fit for public office.

Table 3

Defining the Islamism and antisemitism factor

Variables of the Islamism and antisemitism factor

Factor loadings of the Islamism and antisemitism factor

Rejecting neighbors: Jews

0.755

Reject: Politicians who do not believe in God are unfit for public office

–0.648

No confidence: The United Nations

0.468

How important is God in your life

0.428

Size of town

0.369

Egypt, for decades influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood and its networks, is still most susceptible to such kinds of anti-Semitic and Islamist mass movements (Trager 2011), while certainly the ex-communist countries with sizeable Muslim communities are the most immune.

Table 4

The country values (factor scores) of the Islamism and antisemitism factor

Country

Islamism and antisemitism

Sample Size

Egypt

0.960

1533

Bangladesh

–0.296

1071

Macedonia

–0.405

200

Kyrgyzstan

–0.599

723

Bosnia and Herzegovina

–0.670

405

Albania

–0.773

466

At this point, we also should emphasize that our data analysis clearly shows the close relationship between the view that inequalities should be increased and the Islamism and Antisemitism factor. This interesting point, revealing the anti-egalitarian character of the Islamist ideology, up to now has been particularly overlooked in ongoing research.

The Egyptian Marxist scholar Samir Amin (NSNBC 2015), debating this phenomenon, came up recently with the interpretation that the mercantile bourgeoisie is the driving element in the Egyptian Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement. In his analysis of the Arab Spring, Amin (2012) also says that,

The political culture offered by the Brotherhood is known for its great simplicity, as this culture is content with only conferring Islamic ‘legitimacy’ to the principle of private property and the ‘free’ market relations, without considering the nature of the activities concerned, which are rudimentary (‘bazaar’) activities that are unable to push forward the national economy and lead to its development.

THE ‘MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD FACTOR’? RE-ANALYZING PEW DATA: IDENTIFYING THE EXTENT OF RELIGIOUS, ANTI-SEMITIC AND PRO-MARKET FORCES

In this chapter, we analyze the close relationship between Muslim antisemitism, Muslim pro-market orientation, and the peculiarly Islamist form of religiosity. Our analysis replicates many of the findings from the above chapter and is based on the PEW data base with 7,706 Muslim interview partners from Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestinian Territories, Russia, Spain, Turkey, and the United States. 53.9 per cent of the variance is explained by our factor analytical model. There are three factors which can be reasonably interpreted:

  • rejecting extremism;

  • lack of social capital;

  • religious, anti-Semitic, and pro-market.

The PEW survey questions are to be seen in our Appendix tables (factor loadings on the variables of the model).

Our results again point out the anti-Semitic nature of contemporary Islamism, which is the breeding ground for the outright and open support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and figures like Osama Ben Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, just to mention two historical representatives of Sunni and Shia Islamism, featured in the PEW studies. Lamentably enough for those who hope that liberal Islam is a way out of the impasse, we must note that according to the PEW data, the frequency of prayer in the setting of Islamist traditionalism is currently positively associated with both the acceptancy of extremism and also the religious anti-Semitic and pro-market sentiments in the population, suggesting the urgent need to rethink basic tenets of dominant Islamic theology in the direction of humanist liberalism in the traditions of the Enlightenment (see Troll 2005). After all, the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic Church, which proved to be a watershed in Catholic views on Judaism, was preceded by several decades of a very thorough theological rethinking of the foundations of the Christian faith by leading theologians (see also Bea 1966). One should not also underestimate the potential of a more thorough theological analysis of the Quranic perspective on the Torah and on Israel, all terms, which positively and frequently appear in the Noble Quran (see Bar-Zeev 2005; Hadi Palazzi 1997, 2010; Röhrich 2004).

The direct correlations between the three factors are relatively small, even if two coefficients are still significant at the one-percent level. Our results allow also some comparative insights into the opinion patterns and sociological realities of the growing Muslim population in Israel, whose political parties are now the third largest political party in the Israeli parliament (see also Zussman 2014; Schnell and Haj-Yahya 2014; Yadlin 2014).

Table 5

Antisemitism, traditionalist religiosity and opinions on the market economy


Religious, anti-Semitic, promarket

Q11G. Please, tell me if you have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable opinion of Jews.

0.705

Q90. How often, if at all, do you pray: hardly ever, only during religious holidays, only on Fridays, only on Fridays and religious holidays, more than once a week, every day at least once, or every day five times?

0.550

Q12A. Please, tell me whether you completely agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree or completely disagree with the following statement. Most people are better off in a free market economy, even though some people are rich and some are poor.

–0.443

Table 6

The country factor scores for nine Muslim communities including Israeli Muslim Arabs

Country

Religious, anti-Semitic, pro-market

Egypt

0.286

Indonesia

–0.566

Israel (Israeli Muslim Arabs)

–1.650

Jordan

0.282

Lebanon

–0.438

Nigeria

–0.506

Pakistan

0.163

Palestinian Territories

0.525

Turkey

–0.495

BEYOND TESSLER'S READING OF THE ARAB BAROMETER RESULTS

To make our presentation complete, we also present a brief summary of our re-analysis of Tessler's original analysis of the Arab Barometer 1 survey data (Tessler 2002, 2004). We have to underline the fact that our results present the contradictory tendencies of the quest for democracy in the Arab countries. Again, our results by and large support our earlier research findings.

Again, there emerge Muslim-Brotherhood style Islamism and other extremist positions taken up by a fraction of Arab publics in the four analyzed countries or territories, namely, Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, and occupied Palestinian territories. There are ten factors which correspond to the standard required mathematical properties of the model (Eigenvalues above +1.0). The ten factors, which explain 56.47 per cent of total variance, are to be called:

  • democratic current in the Arab world;

  • Arab discontent;

  • favoring democracy in general;

  • the West is democratic;

  • democracy completely suitable for the home country;

  • people of old age with little formal education;

  • distance to traditionalist religion;

  • rejecting terrorism against the United States;

  • female younger generation identification with democracy in the country and with the Arab League;

  • pessimism about America's power.

Here, we analyze just two factors in more detail, and document our results in the Appendix. The first factor is favoring democracy in general.

Table 7

Favoring democracy in general

Arab Barometer variable

Factor loadings with favoring democracy

q2322 disagree: Democracies are indecisive and have too much of squabbling

0.786

q2323 disagree: Democracies are not good at maintaining order

0.785

q2321 disagree: In a democracy, the economy runs badly 1 = Strong agree

0.764

q5041 disagree: Democracy is a Western form of government not compatible with Islam

0.384

As we highlighted earlier, direct support for terrorism in the Arab world cannot be separated from the anti-Western general cultural atmosphere of Islamism, cultivated currently by the Islamist mass movements (‘Muslim Brotherhood’ andMilli Görus’).

Table 8

Rejecting terrorism against the United States

Arab Barometer variable

Factor loadings with rejecting terrorism against the United States

q604 disagree: US involvement in the region justifies armed operations against US everywhere

0.768

q609 disagree: Exposure to the culture of the US and other Western countries harmful effect

0.489

q5045 disagree: If a Muslim converts to another religion, he must be punished by death penalty

0.414

q4013 disagree: Men of religion should have influence over decisions of the government

0.330

That implies that someone who really favors terrorism against the United States, will think – just like the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ and the Turkish ‘Milli Görüs’ – that the exposure to Western culture has harmful effects; and she or he will also think that if a Muslim converts to another religion, she or he must be punished by the death penalty. Like the mainstream of ‘moderate Islamism’ such a person will equally argue that men of religion should have influence over decisions of the government.

Table 9 provides international decision makers with a ‘map’ of the ten main factors of opinions in Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories.

Table 9

The country factor scores

Country/Territory

Algeria

Jordan

Lebanon

O. Palestinian T.

Democratic movement in the Arab world

–0.197

–0.526

1.156

–0.148

Arab discontent

0.738

–0.122

0.577

–0.389

Favoring democracy

–0.125

–0.045

0.421

–0.106

The West is democratic

–0.304

0.228

0.150

–0.073

Democracy completely suitable for the home country

–0.185

–0.015

0.626

–0.181

People of old age with little formal education

–0.734

0.180

–0.257

0.236

Distance to traditionalist religion

–0.101

0.180

0.288

–0.165

Rejecting terrorism against the United States

–0.114

0.016

0.778

–0.276

Female younger generation identification with democracy in the country and the Arab League

–0.434

0.300

–0.186

0.063

Pessimism about America's power

–0.187

–0.140

0.084

0.088

N =

189

292

246

632

Finally, Figs 2 and 3 highlight the relationships between the ten factors of the model for two of the dimensions, whose urgency is self-evident for the international decision makers: the rejection of terrorism against the United States and what leads Arab publics to think that the West is democratic. Our Appendix further highlights these results.

Fig. 2. The drivers of rejecting terrorism against the United States

Fig. 3. What leads Arab publics to think that the West is democratic?

Our ‘Arab Barometer’ centered research has shown that there is an important process of Arab discontent which is connected with the desire for democracy and also which is not part and parcel of the Islamist current. This, perhaps, is the most hopeful message of this analysis. The Islamists claim that they ‘represent the masses,’ while in reality, as Samir Amin (2012) correctly argues, they are a movement deeply rooted in the mercantile bourgeoisie attempting to confer Islamic ‘legitimacy’ to the principle of private property and the ‘free’ market relations. With all the authoritarian right wing movements in Europe and Latin America in the 1930s, Islamism shares a typical ‘class base’ of movements which quite correctly can be termed as ‘fascist’ (Wippermann 1985; Senghaas 1982). With the great majority of all these right wing movements in Europe and with the populist movements in Latin America of the 1930s, Islamism shares antisemitism as an additional and systemic characteristic. Our research also re-iterates the findings by Kostenko et al. 2014 about the intense generational gaps characterizing Arab politics.

Fig. 4 finally highlights the connections, emerging from our re-analysis of the Arab Barometer data.

Fig. 4. The quest for democracy in the Arab world

CONCLUSIONS AND PROSPECTS

The evidence presented in this paper also contributes to the growing consensus in the literature that the policies of the present Obama administration towards Egypt under the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ and Turkey under Erdogan were and are deeply flawed (Pierce 2014). Pierce alleges that the only consistent aspect of the Obama administration's policy toward Egypt has been relations and engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood. Lebl (2014a, 2014b) also analyses this trend by saying that after the attacks of September 11, 2001, organizations linked to the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ have acquired a high profile in Europe, presenting themselves as Westerners' best choice of interlocutor with European Muslim communities and exploiting the multiculturalist tendencies of EU elite interlocutors.

On an empirical level, the sound and robust political conclusion of this essay is twofold: the ‘moderate Islamists’ are neither moderate, nor do they represent the poor, but rather they represent a movement which has many similarities with the authoritarian right-wing movements of the 1930s in Europe and Latin America. Secular democracy movements in the Arab world and beyond in the entire Muslim world deserve our undivided solidarity, while the ‘moderate Islamists’ do not. By critically evaluating Professor Tessler's empirical evidence, which greatly influenced the current thinking of the Obama administration in the United States, we have come to the above conclusions.

In a nutshell, the readers of this article should find enough empirical arguments to draw the main additional political conclusion of this essay for them on their own: how long can the West and also BRICS countries ostracize Egypt's President Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil el-Sisi, who made a credible effort to curtail the influence of the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’, while Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has done everything to rehabilitate the anti-Semitic mass movement ‘Milli Görüs’ and his Islamist predecessor in power, Erbakan, still can consider that Turkey under his leadership is a credible candidate for European Union membership?

Europe has to make a choice, too. If the European Union is a community of values not only for the politician's Sunday speeches, we have to apply the tradition of the Enlightenment (Bergson 1935) also to our day-to-day decisions on such matters as immigration and European Union enlargement.

We concur with Mansur when he says that,

The world at the end of the twentieth century was not prepared to encounter Islamism as an ideology of hate and terror. The terrorist acts of war unleashed by Islamists on September 11, 2001 came as a shock. Since that day, the world has been informed about Islamists and now needs to recall from history how violence born of Jew-hatred or anti-Semitism does not end with the Jews; nor is it only about the Jews. Anti-Semitism was, and remains, a plague that endangers us all. There is an urgent need to quell, rather than appease, Muslim anti-Semitism. The suicidal acts of terrorism, in which Islamists have engaged before and since the 9/11 attacks, demonstrate their willingness – should they acquire the weapons – to bring about their own version of Götterdämmerung in their fanatical and pagan desire to destroy the enemy. The world stands warned (Mansur 2015).

As Bassam Tibi correctly says,

In Europe following the attacks on 11 September, and more so after the assaults on Madrid, the Islamist execution of van Gogh in Amsterdam, and the […] uprising in the suburbs of Paris, it has become in a way easier to characterize jihadist Islamism as a threat to what Karl Popper called ‘the open society’, and to condemn totalitarianism from an Enlightenment humanist standpoint without being defamed. […] It is a fact that Islamists are constructing a putative Islamophobia by associating any suggestions that Islamism is a totalitarian ideology with an alleged demonization of Islam. Therefore, the principles of an enlightened critique of Islamists needs to be established without losing sight of the way (Tibi 2007).

Summing up our assessments, we can only concur with the statements of the great Israeli scholar Robert Solomon Wistrich (1945–2015) who recently maintained10 that there is something distorted in present day multiculturalism, which is so fashionable not only in North America, but also in Europe and in other parts of the world. We can only agree with Wistrich when he says that it is remarkable that open Western societies embracing pluralist values, which are also supposed to be good for Jews – have in effect produced in the past thirty years some virulent new strains of antisemitism. Partly this grows out of an almost demented glorification of the Palestinians, which has nothing to do with reality. But the ‘pluralist’ attitude has also been problematic since it tends to marginalize Jews in the West as part of the oppressive ruling elites. On the other hand, Muslim immigrants in Europe today are viewed as victims; they are therefore always right and should be appeased. Jews are no longer perceived as victims. They are, according to them, rich, powerful, exploitative, and aggressive. This is not merely untrue but also an anti-Semitic stereotype.

NOTES

1 URL: http://www. nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Religion/Muslim/ Muslim-population and http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database. Interested readers are also being referred to the author's website at https://uibk.academia.edu/ ArnoTausch/Documentation-for-books-and-articles for further statistical evidence on the issues of this article.

2 URL: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp [free download facility for SPSS data files].

3 URL: http://www.pewglobal.org/category/datasets/ [free download facility for SPSS data files].

4 URL: http://www.arabbarometer.org/. See note above.

5 Tessler's hypotheses imply that if America changes its policies, Islamist extremism will decrease. So we attempt to refer somewhat ironically to these hypotheses as a type of ‘our sins’ (in Latin: peccata nostra) theory, in a reference to the Roman Catholic liturgy.

6 Age, gender and educational level were kept constant.

7 URL: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/10992886/Anti-Semitism-on-the-march-Europe-braces-for-violence.html

8 URL: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/07/antisemitism-rise-europe-worst-since-nazis

9 URL: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/.premium-1.606686

10 URL: http://sicsa.huji.ac.il/multiculti.htm

11 All downloads: July 31, 2015.

REFERENCES11

Altemeyer, B., and Hunsberger, B. 2004. Research: A Revised Religious Fundamentalism Scale: The Short and Sweet of it. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 14 (1): 47–54.

Amin, S. 2012. The Arab Revolutions: A Year After. Interface 4 (1): 33–42.

ADL – Anti-Defamation League. 2014. ADL 100 Index. URL: http:// global100.adl.org/.

Arab Barometer. 2015. URL: http://www.arabbarometer.org/.

Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies. 2015. A Majority of Arabs Oppose ISIL, Support Air strikes on the Group. URL: http://english. dohainstitute.org/content/6a355a64-5237-4d7a-b957-87f6b1ceba9b.

Ayalon, A. 2002. Fighting Terrorism: Lessons from the Front Line. In Satloff, R. B. (ed.), War on Terror: The Middle East Dimension (pp. 3–7). Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Bar-Zeev, H. 2005. Une lecture juive du Coran. Paris: Berg International.

Bauer, Y. 1993. Antisemitism as a European and World Problem. Patterns of Prejudice 27(1): 15–24.

BBC. 2015. Kenya Attack: 147 Dead in Garissa University Assault. BBC News, April 3. URL: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-32169 080.

Bea, A. 1966. The Church and the Jewish People; a Commentary on the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. New York: Harper & Row.

Bergesen, A. (еd.) 2008. The Sayyid Qutb Reader: Selected Writings on Politics, Religion, and Society. London – New York: Routledge.

Bergson, H. 1935. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Translated by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton, with the Assistance of W. Horsfall Carter. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd.

Blalock, H. M. 1972. Social Statistics. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Blaydes, L., and Linzer, D. A. 2010. Losing Muslim Hearts and Minds: Religiosity, Elite Competition, and Anti-Americanism in the Islamic World. URL: http://web.stanford.edu/~blaydes/AA_ISA.pdf.

Ciftci, S. 2010. Modernization, Islam, or Social Capital: What Explains Attitudes toward Democracy in the Muslim World? Comparative Political Studies 43 (11): 1442–1470.

Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism 2015. URL: http:// antisemitism.org.il/?lang=en.

Davidov, E., Schmidt, P., and Billiet, J. 2011. Cross-Cultural Analysis: Methods and Applications. New York: Routledge.

Die Welt. 2011. Türken tragen Antisemit Erbakan zu Grabe. URL: http:// www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article12672542/Tuerken-tragen-Anti semit-Erbakan-zu-Grabe.html.

Elsenhans, H. 1991. Development and Underdevelopment: The History, Economics, and Politics of North-South Relations. New Delhi – Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Finch, H. 2006. Comparison of the Performance of Varimax and Promax Rotations: Factor Structure Recovery for Dichotomous Items. Journal of Educational Measurement 43 (1): 39–52.

Ganji, A. 2013. Who Is Ali Khamenei? The Worldview of Iran's Supreme Leader. Foreign Affairs 148 (4). URL: https://www.foreignaffairs. com/articles/iran/2013-08-12/who-ali-khamenei.

Google Scholar 2015. Entry for Professor Mark Tessler. URL: http:// scholar.google.at/scholar?as_q=&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_ occt=any&as_sauthors=mark+tessler&as_publication=&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&btnG=&hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5.

Gorsuch, R. L. 1983. Factor Analysis. Hillsdale, N. J.: Erlbaum.

Gunning, J., and Jackson, R. 2011. What's so ‘Religious’ about ‘Religious Terrorism’? Critical Studies on Terrorism 4 (3): 369–388.

Hadi Palazzi, A. 1997. The Jewish-Moslem Dialogue and the Question of Jerusalem. Jerusalem: Institute of the World Jewish Congress.

Hadi Palazzi, A. 2010. Allah Is a Zionist. The Quranic Argument for Jewish Sovereignty in the Land of Israel. The Tablet, March 18. URL: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/28575/allah-is-a-zionist.

Harman, H. H. 1976. Modern Factor Analysis. 3rd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Heinemann, J. et al. 2007. Antisemitism. In Berenbaum M., and Skolnik, F. (eds.), Encyclopaedia Judaica (pp. 206–246). 2nd ed. Vol. 2. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, Gale Virtual Reference Library.

Heirs of Former Turkish Prime Minister N. Erbakan 2015. URL: http:// www.necmettinerbakan.org/.

Heller, M. 2015. Islam and Terrorism: A Futile Debate. INSS Insight No. 659, January 28. URL: http://www.inss.org.il/index.aspx?id=4538& articleid=8632.

IBM. 2011. IBM SPSS 20 Documentation. Armonk, New York. URL: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27021213#en.

Inglehart R. F., and Baker, W. E. 2000. Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values. American Sociological Review 65 (1): 19–51. URL: http://scholar.google.at/citations?view_op= view_citation&hl=de&user=r3vC6IAAAAAJ&citation_for_view=r3vC6IAAAAAJ:9yKSN-GCB0IC.

Institute for Economics and Peace. 2014. Global Terrorism Index 2014. Institute for Economics and Peace. URL: http://www.visionofhu manity.org/sites/default/files/Global%20Terrorism%20Index%20Re port%202014_0.pdf.

Jackson, R. 2006. The State and Terrorist Sanctuaries: A Critical Analysis. Paper prepared for the British International Studies Association (BISA) Annual Conference, 18–20 December. University of Cork, Ireland.

Jackson, R. 2007a. Constructing Enemies: ‘Islamic Terrorism’ in Political and Academic Discourse. Government and Opposition 42 (3): 394–426.

Jackson, R. 2007b. The Core Commitments of Critical Terrorism Studies. European Political Science 6 (3): 244–251.

Jerusalem Post. 2015. Israel is Standing by Europe, Europe Must Stand by Israel. URL: http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplo macy/Netanyahu-Israel-is-standing-by-Europe-Europe-must-stand-by-Israel-387083.

Jolliffe, J. 2002. Principal Component Analysis. London: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Juergensmeyer, M. et al. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kaplan, E. H. and Small, C. A. 2006. Anti-Israel Sentiment Predicts Antisemitism in Europe. Journal of Conflict Resolution 50 (4): 548–561.

Kostenko, V., Kuzmichev, P., and Ponarin, E. 2014. Attitudes towards Gender Equality and Perception of Democracy in the Arab World (August 25). Moscow, Higher School of Economics Research Paper No. WP BRP 50/SOC/2014. URL: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2486567.

Küng, H. 2002. Tracing The Way: Spiritual Dimensions of the World Religions. New York: Continuum.

Kurzman, C., and Ijlal, N. 2010. Do Muslims Vote Islamic? Journal of Democracy 21 (2): 50–63.

Lebl, L. S. 2010. Radical Islam in Europe. Orbis 54 (1): 46–60.

Lebl, L. S. 2013. The Sons of Pigs and Apes: Muslim Anti-Semitism and the Conspiracy of Silence. Middle East Quarterly 20 (3): 95.

Lebl, L. S. 2014a. The EU, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Orbis 57(1): 101–119.

Lebl, L. S. 2014b. The Islamist Threat to European Security. Middle East Quarterly 21 (3). URL: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/sear ch?q=cache:bL4E40YEtWQJ:www.meforum.org/3837/the-islamist-threat-to-european-security+&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=at.

Mansur, S. 2015. Arab and Muslim Antisemitism: A Muslim Perspective. Gatestone Institute. URL: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4364/ara b-muslim-antisemitism.

Neumann, P. R. 2014. The New Jihadism. A Global Snapshot. London: International Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence and BBC World Service. URL: http://icsr.info/wp-content/ uploads/2014/12/ICSR-REPORT-The-New-Jihadism-A-Global-Snap shot.pdf.

NSNBC. 2015. Samir Amin on Sisi, Egypt and Turkey. URL: http:// nsnbc.me/2014/03/31/samir-amin-sisi-egypt-turkey/.

Office of the Prime Minister, the State of Israel. 2015. URL: http://www. pmo.gov.il/English/MediaCenter/Speeches/Pages/speechfunreal130115.aspx.

Paz, R. 2015. The Islamist Perspective. In Rubin, B., and Rubin, J. C. (eds.), The Loathing of America: Anti-Americanism Old and New. Herzliya: Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Interdisciplinary Center. URL: http://www.rubincenter.org/projects/p-r-i-s-m/.

PEW Research Center, Global Attitudes and Trends. 2015. URL: http:// www.pewglobal.org/category/datasets/.

Pierce, A. 2014. US ‘Partnership’ with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its Effect on Civil Society and Human Rights. Society 51 (1): 68–86.

Popper, K. 2012. The Open Society and its Enemies. Routledge.

Puar, J. 2011. Citation and Censorship: The Politics of Talking About the Sexual Politics of Israel. Feminist Legal Studies 19 (2): 133–142.

Qutb, S. 1990. Milestones. Indianapolis: American Trust.

Qutb, S. 2000. Social Justice in Islam. Oneonta, N.Y.: Islamic Publications International.

Qutb, S., and Algar, H. 2006. Basic Principles of the Islamic Worldview. North Haledon, N.J.: Islamic Publications International.

Qutb, S., Salahi, M. A., and Shamis, A. A. 1979. In the Shade of the Qurʼān. London: MWH.

Reuters. 2015. Hezbollah leader on Charlie Hebdo: ‘Extremists More Offensive to Islam than Cartoons’. Reuters, January 10. URL: https://www.rt.com/news/221343-hezbollah-nasrallah-charlie-offends/.

Röhrich, W. 2004. Die Macht der Religionen: Glaubenskonflikte in der Weltpolitik. München: Beck.

Röhrich, W. 2010. Rückkehr der Kulturen: die neuen Mächte in der Weltpolitik. Baden-Baden: Nomos.

Rummel, R. J. 1970. Applied Factor Analysis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Sacks, J. 2014. The Religious Other: Hostility, Hospitality, and the Hope of Human Flourishing. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Schnell, I., and Nasreen, Haj-Yahya. 2014. Arab Integration in Jewish-Israeli Social Space: Does Commuting Make a Difference? Urban Geography 35(7): 1084–1104.

Senghaas, D. 1985. The European Experience: a Historical Critique of Development Theory. Leamington Spa, Warwickshire; Dover, N.H., USA: Berg Publishers.

Spierings, N. 2014. The Influence of Islamic Orientations on Democratic Support and Tolerance in five Arab Countries. Politics and Religion 7 (4): 706–733.

Tabachnick, B. G., and Fidell, L. S. 2001. Using Multivariate Statistics. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Tausch, A., and Moaddel, M. 2009. What 1.3 billion Muslims Really Think. An Answer to a Recent Gallup Study, Based on the ‘World Values Survey’. Hauppauge, N. Y.: Nova Science Publishers.

Tausch, A., Heshmati, A., and Karoui, H. 2014. The Political Algebra of Global Value Change: General Models and Implications for the Muslim World. New York: Nova Science Publishers.

Tessler, M. 2002. Do Islamic Orientations Influence Attitudes toward Democracy in the Arab World? Evidence from Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Algeria. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 43 (3–5): 229–249.

Tessler, M. 2004. Arab and Muslim Political Attitudes: Stereotypes and Evidence from Survey Research. International Studies Perspectives 4 (2).

Tessler, M., and Gao, E. 2005. Gauging Arab Support for Democracy. Journal of Democracy 16 (3): 83–97.

Tessler, M., and Robbins, M. D. H. 2007. What Leads Some Ordinary Arab Men and Women to Approve of Terrorist Acts against the United States? Journal of Conflict Resolution 51 (2): 305–328.

Tibi, B. 2007. The Totalitarianism of Jihadist Islamism and its Challenge to Europe and to Islam. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8 (1): 35–54.

Tibi, B. 2012. Islamism and Islam. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Tibi, B. 2015. From Sayyid Qutb to Hamas: The Middle East Conflict & the Islamization of Antisemitism. New York: Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). URL: http://isgap.org/ working-paper-bassam-tibi/.

Trager, E. 2011. The Unbreakable Muslim Brotherhood: Grim Prospects for a Liberal Egypt. Foreign Affairs 90 (5): 114–126.

Troll, C. 2005. Progressive Thinking in Contemporary Islam. Conference of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and the Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, September 22–24, 2005, Frankfurt a. M.. URL: http://www.sankt-georgen.de/leseraum/ troll28.pdf.

Vielhaber, D. 2012. The Milli Görüs of Germany. The Hudson Institute, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, 13. URL: http://www.hudson. org/search?q=milli+g%C3%B6r%C3%BCs.

Wallstreet Journal. 2015. Immigration and Islam: Europe's Crisis of Faith. URL: http://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-immigration-and-is lam-europes-crisis-of-faith-1421450060.

Werbner, P. 2013. Folk Devils and Racist Imaginaries in a Global Prism: Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism in the Twenty-First Century. Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (3): 450–467.

Wippermann, W. 1983. Europäischer Faschismus im Vergleich (1922–1982). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Wistrich, R. S. 1991. Antisemitism: the Longest Hatred. New York: Pantheon Books.

Wistrich, R. S. 2004. Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Jewish Political Studies Review: 27–31.

Wistrich, R. S. 2007. Anti-semitism and Multiculturalism: The Uneasy Connection. Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Wistrich, R. S. 2010. A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad. New York: Random House.

World Values Survey 2015. URL: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ wvs.jsp.

Yadlin, A. et al. 2014. Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinians: Four Strategic Options. Strategic Assessment 17 (1): 7–19.

Yeşilada, B. A., and Noordijk, P. 2010. Changing Values in Turkey: Religiosity and Tolerance in Comparative Perspective. Turkish Studies 11 (1): 9–27.

Zussman, A. 2014. The Effect of Political Violence on Religiosity. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 104: 64–83.

STATISTICAL APPENDIX

Antisemitism as the key towards understanding Islamism

13,881 representative Muslim individuals in the World Values Survey.

Partial correlations of rejecting Jewish neighbors


Control Variables: Age & Gender & Education (country specific)


Rejecting Neighbors: Jews



Rejecting Neighbors: Jews – Partial Correlation

Error p

Degrees of freedom

No confidence: The United Nations

0.328

0.000

4851

Disagree: Islam requires woman to dress modestly but does not require cover face with veil

0.259

0.000

2214

Democracy: Religious authorities interpret the laws

0.163

0.000

1518

Democracy: The army takes over when government is incompetent

0.151

0.000

1484

No confidence: Major Companies

0.139

0.000

4851

Democracy: Governments tax the rich and subsidize the poor

0.135

0.000

1567

Political system: Having a strong leader

0.134

0.000

4851

Justifiable: homosexuality

–0.100

0.000

4851

Disagree: Islam requires that political rights of non-Muslims should be inferior to those of Muslims

–0.111

0.000

1973

Justifiable: divorce

–0.173

0.000

4851

Not serious: cultural invasion by the west

–0.183

0.000

3346

Disagree: violation of Islam for male and female university students to attend classes together

–0.185

0.000

2158

Disagree: a truly Islamic country should not have a parliament with the right to pass laws

–0.215

0.000

1817

Politicians who do not believe in God are fit for public office

–0.314

0.000

4851

Dissatisfied with the people in national office

–0.475

0.000

4851

Eigenvalues and total variance explained

Factors

Eigenvalue

% of variance explained

Cumulated %

1

1.952

13.943

13.943

2

1.720

12.285

26.228

3

1.614

11.528

37.756

4

1.199

8.561

46.317

5

1.107

7.904

54.221

6

1.015

7.251

61.473

61.473 % of total variance explained

Factor loadings in the promax factor analytical model


Older Generation

Islamism and Antisemitism

Distrust of the Army and the Press

Urban Upper Class

Secularism

Urban women

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Rejecting neighbors: People of a different race

–0.132

0.190

0.579

–0.285

–0.043

0.346

Education level (recoded)

–0.383

–0.186

0.149

0.620

0.210

–0.244

Reject: Politicians who do not believe in God are unfit for public office

–0.027

0.648

0.192

0.134

0.281

–0.146

No confidence: Armed Forces

–0.081

0.067

0.561

–0.016

0.182

–0.069

No confidence: The Press

–0.013

–0.192

0.740

0.020

0.104

–0.056

Age

0.888

0.026

0.055

–0.013

–0.050

–0.039

Income level

–0.047

0.052

–0.029

0.714

–0.008

–0.032

No confidence: The United Nations

0.100

0.468

0.475

0.179

0.109

–0.007

Rejecting neighbors: Jews

0.065

0.755

0.011

0.180

0.107

0.004

How many children do you have

0.865

0.106

–0.095

–0.203

–0.091

0.056

Never attend religious services

–0.068

0.130

0.085

0.038

0.803

0.129

How important is God in your life

–0.003

0.428

–0.267

–0.113

0.699

0.164

Size of town

0.110

0.369

0.107

0.623

0.001

0.373

Gender

–0.052

0.034

–0.023

–0.018

0.045

0.851

Correlations between the factors

Correlations

Older Generation

Islamism and Anti-Semitism

Distrust of the army and the press

urban upper class

secularism

Islamism and anti-Semitism

0.100**





Distrust of the army and the press

0.037**

–0.095**




Urban upper class

–0.076**

0.036**

0.225**



Secularism

–0.088**

0.106**

0.220**

0.139**


Urban women

0.106**

0.162**

0.028**

0.057**

–0.084**

Note: With n = 13,381, the correlation coefficients marked with a double asterisk (**) are significant at the 1 % level (two-tailed); see: URL: http://www.socscista tistics.com/pvalues/pearsondistribution.aspx.

Country factor scores

Country/Region

Older Generation

Islamism and Antisemitism

Distrust of the Army and the Press

Urban Upper Class

Secularism

Urban Women

N

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Albania

0.155

–0.773

0.320

–0.283

0.529

–0.069

466

Bangladesh

–0.266

–0.296

–0.954

–0.350

–0.407

–0.282

1071

Bosnia and Herzegovina

0.135

–0.670

0.495

0.329

0.049

0.180

405

Egypt

0.156

0.960

0.080

0.305

-0.072

0.213

1533

Kyrgyzstan

–0.077

–0.599

0.444

–0.038

0.516

–0.086

723

Macedonia

–0.095

–0.405

1.084

–0.417

–0.475

–0.064

200

Islamism, Antisemitism and positions on socio-economic inequality

Islamism and antisemitism among global Muslim publics: the factor loadings

The ‘Muslim Brotherhood factor’? Re-analyzing PEW data: identifying the extent of religious, anti-Semitic and pro-market forces

Country

N

Canada

11

Egypt

937

France

37

Germany

12

Great Britain

19

India

115

Indonesia

933

Israel

132

Jordan

963

Kenya

75

Lebanon

572

Nigeria

499

Pakistan

1198

Palestinian Territories

1127

Russia

79

Spain

7

Turkey

986

United States

4

Total

7706

Eigenvalues and total variance explained

Factor

Eigenvalue

% of variance

Cumulated % age

1

2.278

25.315

25.315

2

1.511

16.794

42.109

3

1.064

11.820

53.929

Factor loadings in the promax factor analytical model


Rejecting Extremism

Lack of Social Capital

Religious, Anti-Semitic, Pro-market

1

2

3

4

Q3A. As I read each of the following, please, tell me whether you are very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with this aspect of your life. Your household income.

0.031

0.813

0.112

Q3B. As I read each of the following, please tell me whether you are very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with this aspect of your life. Your family life.

–0.013

0.796

0.066

Q11G. Please, tell me if you have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable opinion of Jews?

0.103

0.144

0.705

Q11K. Please, tell me if you have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable opinion of Hamas?

0.769

–0.050

–0.021

Q11L. Please, tell me if you have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable opinion of Hezbollah?

0.816

–0.043

0.023

Q12A. Please, tell me whether you completely agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree or completely disagree with the following statement. Most people are better off in a free market economy, even though some people are rich and some are poor.

–0.058

0.411

0.443

Q21E. Now I'm going to read a list of political leaders. For each, tell me how much confidence you have in each leader to do the right thing regarding world affairs – Osama bin Laden.

0.597

–0.009

–0.275

Q21F. Now I'm going to read a list of political leaders. For each, tell me how much confidence you have in each leader to do the right thing regarding world affairs – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

0.744

0.104

0.055

Q90. How often, if at all, do you pray: hardly ever, only during religious holidays, only on Fridays, only on Fridays and religious holidays, more than once a week, every day at least once, or every day five times?

0.300

0.073

0.550

Correlations between the factors


Rejecting Extremism

Lack of social capital

Lack of social capital

–0.008


Religious, Anti-Semitic, pro-market

–0.043**

0.035**

Note: With n = 7706, the correlation coefficients marked with a double asterix (**) are significant at the 1 % level (two-tailed); see URL: http://www.socscista tistics.com/pvalues/pearsondistribution.aspx.

Country factor scores

Country

Rejecting Extremism

Lack of Social Capital

Religious, Anti-Semitic, pro-market

Egypt

0.060

0.530

0.286

Indonesia

–0.312

–0.074

–0.566

Israel

0.215

–0.704

–1.650

Jordan

–0.158

0.399

0.282

Lebanon

0.250

–0.216

–0.438

Nigeria

–0.957

–0.147

–0.506

Pakistan

–0.121

–0.283

0.163

Palestinian Territories

–0.170

–0.252

0.525

Turkey

1.169

–0.251

–0.495

The political sociology of nine Muslim communities including Israeli Muslim Arabs – rejecting extremism

The political sociology of nine Muslim communities including Israeli Muslim Arabs – lack of social capital

The political sociology of nine Muslim communities including Israeli Muslim Arabs – religious anti-Semitic pro-market attitudes

Beyond Tessler's reading of the Arab Barometer results.

An analysis of the data from the Arab Barometer Survey the drivers of democracy and radicalism in Arab countries (sample countries comprising only 1/6 of the inhabitants of the Arab League).

Our sample is based on the Arab barometer survey, comprising Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories. Together with the suspended member country Syria, the League comprises more than 400 million people:

• Algeria

• Bahrain

• Comoros

• Djibouti

• Egypt

• Iraq

• Jordan

• Kuwait

• Lebanon

• Libya

• Mauritania

• Morocco

• Oman

• Palestinian O.T.

• Qatar

• Saudi Arabia

• Somalia

• Sudan

• Tunisia

• United Arab Emirates

• Yemen

N = 1359 interview partners with complete data

Eigenvalues and total variance explained

Component

Initial Eigenvalue

% of variance

Cumulated % age

1

3.969

13.232

13.232

2

2.236

7.454

20.685

3

1.799

5.997

26.683

4

1.512

5.041

31.724

5

1.389

4.632

36.355

6

1.369

4.564

40.919

7

1.221

4.068

44.988

8

1.190

3.967

48.955

9

1.182

3.939

52.894

10

1.075

3.583

56.477

The factors which can be interpreted as reliably reflecting the dynamics of Arab Opinion according to the Arab Barometer study, analyzed here (31.72 % of total variance explained).


Democratic current in the Arab world

Arab Discontent

Favoring Democracy

The West is Democratic

1

2

3

4

5

q211 On the whole, recent elections not free

–0.086

0.533

–0.029

–0.062

q2321 disagree: In a democracy, the economy runs badly 1 = Strong agree

0.308

0.135

0.764

0.026

q2322 disagree: Democracies are indecisive and have too

0.147

–0.009

0.786

–0.004

q2323 disagree: Democracies are not good at maintaining order

0.317

0.042

0.785

0.046

q2324 disagree: Democracy may have its problems but it is better

–0.179

–0.010

–0.102

–0.068

q236 How democratic is Turkey?

–0.077

–0.063

0.056

0.557

q239 How democratic is the United States?

0.070

0.036

0.030

0.826

q241 How democratic is Israel?

0.088

–0.035

–0.034

0.796

q243 Democracy completely suitable for [respondent’s country].

0.010

-0.183

0.299

0.072

q244 Very satisfied with the country's government

0.350

0.547

0.090

0.134

q2461 Parliamentary system not suitable

–0.149

–0.047

–0.094

0.088

q2462 A parliamentary system with only Islamic parties not suitable

0.729

0.180

0.204

0.027

q2464 A system governed by Islamic law not suitable

0.697

0.185

0.176

0.050

q4013 disagree: Men of religion should have influence over decisions of the government

0.611

0.210

0.198

0.058

q5041 disagree: Democracy is a Western form of government not compatible with Islam

0.433

–0.008

0.384

0.108

q5042 disagree: Islam requires that in a Muslim country the rights of non-Muslims are inferior

0.559

0.051

0.270

0.074

q5045 disagree If a Muslim converts to another religion, he must be punished by death penalty

0.557

0.234

0.228

0.093

q5071 disagree: Government officials are knowledgeable of citizen's needs

0.151

0.640

0.125

–0.026

q5072 disagree: Our political leaders care about ordinary citizens

0.262

0.784

0.056

0.009

q5074 disagree: Our government creates conditions for people to prosper

0.309

0.779

0.018

0.014

q602 disagree: Arab League has been effective

0.207

0.193

-0.084

-0.028

q604 disagree: US involvement in the region justifies armed operations against US everywhere

0.114

0.059

0.087

0.006

q606 disagree: US democracy promotion in the region has successful

0.079

0.117

0.065

–0.072

q608 disagree: The culture of US and other Western countries many positive attributes

0.420

0.028

–0.124

–0.120

q609 disagree: Exposure to the culture of the US and other Western countries harmful effect

0.275

–0.038

0.174

0.152

q701 Age

0.176

–0.043

0.031

–0.170

q702 Sex female

–0.027

–0.023

-0.060

0.010

q703 Education

0.200

0.117

0.075

–0.032

q712 Do not often/never read the Quran

0.221

0.156

0.076

0.064

q713 Do you pray? No

0.104

0.041

0.036

–0.015


democratic current in the Arab world

Arab discontent

favoring democracy

The West is democratic

The factors which can be interpreted only with some caution (further 24.75 % of total variance explained)


Democracy Completely Suitable

People of Old age with Little Formal Education

Distance to Religion

Favoring US Involvement

Female Younger Generation Identification with Democracy in the Country and with the Arab League

Pessimism about America’s Power

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

q211 On the whole, recent elections are not free

–0.015

–0.338

–0.034

0.068

–0.157

–0.277

q2321 disagree: In a democracy, the economy runs badly 1 = Strong agree

0.211

–0.024

0.077

0.051

-0.043

0.145

q2322 disagree: Democracies are indecisive and have too

0.110

0.004

0.058

0.067

0.096

–0.009

q2323 disagree: Democracies are not good at maintaining order

0.263

–0.075

0.039

0.105

0.005

0.121

q2324 disagree: Democracy may have its problems but it is better

0.690

0.066

–0.056

–0.053

–0.064

-0.083

q236 How democratic is Turkey?

0.006

0.194

0.284

-0.154

0.273

0.130

q239 How democratic is the United States?

0.051

–0.117

0.032

0.107

0.050

–0.118

q241 How democratic is Israel?

–0.002

–0.078

–0.083

0.052

–0.088

–0.011

q243 Democracy completely suitable for [respondent's country].

0.560

0.256

0.350

0.215

0.473

0.291

q244 Very satisfied with the country's government

0.101

0.423

0.175

0.125

0.384

0.269

q2461 Parliamentary system is not suitable

0.618

–0.020

0.091

0.031

0.280

0.085

q2462 A parliamentary system with only Islamic parties is not suitable

0.125

–0.137

0.074

–0.024

–0.133

0.102

q2464 A system governed by Islamic law is not suitable

0.152

–0.056

0.067

0.184

–0.070

0.005

q4013 disagree: Men of religion should have influence over decisions of the government

0.253

–0.042

0.174

0.330

–0.060

–0.016

q5041 disagree: Democracy is a Western form of government not compatible with Islam

0.375

–0.128

–0.031

–0.310

0.166

0.264

q5042 disagree: Islam requires that in a Muslim country the rights of non-Muslims are inferior

0.256

0.000

0.074

–-0.112

0.114

0.355

q5045 disagree If a Muslim converts to another religion, he must be punished by death penalty

0.211

–0.118

0.179

0.414

–0.018

–0.044

q5071 disagree: Government officials are knowledgeable of citizen's needs

0.004

0.076

0.069

0.006

–0.007

0.069

q5072 disagree: Our political leaders care about ordinary citizens

0.054

–0.087

0.002

0.035

–0.117

0.142

q5074 disagree: Our government creates conditions for people to prosper

0.003

–0.168

0.045

0.061

–0.134

0.111

q602 disagree: Arab League has been effective

0.089

–0.176

–0.188

–0.038

0.455

0.414

q604 disagree: US involvement in the region justifies armed operations against US everywhere

0.008

–0.032

0.038

0.768

0.024

0.009

q606 disagree: US democracy promotion in the region is successful

0.007

0.026

–0.005

–0.017

0.013

0.736

q608 disagree: The culture of US and other Western countries has many positive attributes

–0.224

0.394

–0.020

–0.054

0.156

0.126

q609 disagree: Exposure to the culture of the US and other Western countries has harmful effect

0.403

–0.012

0.134

0.489

–0.138

0.008

q701 Age

0.166

0.572

–0.273

0.024

0.330

0.072

q702 Sex female

–0.087

–0.048

–0.133

–0.058

0.618

–0.018

q703 Education

0.069

0.748

–0.121

0.025

–0.149

0.021

q712 Do not often/never read the Quran

0.107

–0.045

0.661

0.136

–0.075

–0.048

q713 Do you pray? No

0.041

–0.014

0.728

0.055

0.003

0.017


democracy completely suitable

people of old age with little formal education

distance to religion

favoring US involvement

female younger generation identification with democracy in the country and with the Arab League

pessimism about America’s power

Close-up on important factors


q241 How democratic is Israel?

q5042 disagree: Islam requires that in a Muslim country the rights of non-Muslims are inferior

q5045 disagree: If a Muslim converts to another religion, he must be punished by death penalty

q604 disagree: US involvement in the region justifies armed operations against US everywhere

q712 Do not often/never read the Quran

q713 Do you pray? No

Arab discontent

–0.035

0.051

0.234

0.059

0.156

0.041

Democracy suitable

–0.002

0.256

0.211

0.008

0.107

0.041

Democratic current

0.088

0.559

0.557

0.114

0.221

0.104

Distance to religion

–0.083

0.074

0.179

0.038

0.661

0.728

Favoring democracy

–0.034

0.270

0.228

0.087

0.076

0.036

Favoring US involvement

0.052

–0.112

0.414

0.768

0.136

0.055

Female younger generation

–0.088

0.114

–0.018

0.024

–0.075

0.003

Fundamentalism, Anti-Americanism

–0.011

0.355

–0.044

0.009

–0.048

0.017

People of old age

–0.078

0.000

–0.118

–0.032

–0.045

–0.014

West democratic

0.796

0.074

0.093

0.006

0.064

–0.015

Correlations between the factors

Correlation matrix of the components

Democratic Current in the Arab World

Arab Discontent

Favoring Democracy

The West is Democratic

Democracy Completely Suitable

People of Old Age with Little Formal Education

Distance to religion

Favoring US Involvement

female younger generation

Arab discontent

0.252**









Favoring democracy

0.285**

–0.014








The West is democratic

0.063

–0.066

0.065







Democracy completely suitable

0.302**

–0.072**

0.319**

0.083**






People of old age with little formal education

0.186**

0.240**

0.050

–0.018

0.066





Distance to religion

0.009

–0.032

0.156**

0.140**

0.133**

0.132**




Favoring US involvement

0.085**

0.042

0.071**

0.050

0.126**

0.034

0.170**



Female younger generation identification with democracy in the country and the Arab League

0.204**

0.241

0.175**

0.152**

0.047

0.232**

0.320**

–0.029


Pessimism about America's power

0.100**

–0.072**

0.186**

0.048

0.188**

0.223**

0.101**

0.113**

0.247**

Note: With n = 1359, the correlation coefficients marked with a double asterisk (**) are significant at the 1 % level (two-tailed); see URL: http://www.socscista tistics.com/pvalues/pearsondistribution.aspx

Country factor scores

Country/ Territory

Algeria

Jordan

Lebanon

Palestinian O. T.

n =

Democratic current in the Arab world

–0.197

–0.526

1.156

–0.148

1359

Arab discontent

0.738

–0.122

0.577

–0.389

1359

Favoring democracy

–0.125

–0.045

0.421

–0.106

1359

The West is democratic

–0.304

0.228

0.15

–0.073

1359

Democracy completely suitable

–0.185

–0.015

0.626

–0.181

1359

People of old age with little formal education

–0.734

0.18

–0.257

0.236

1359

Distance to religion

–0.101

0.18

0.288

–0.165

1359

Favoring US involvement

–0.114

0.016

0.778

–0.276

1359

Female younger generation identification with democracy in the country and the Arab League

–0.434

0.3

–0.186

0.063

1359

Pessimism about America's power

–0.187

–0.14

0.084

0.088

1359

n =

189

292

246

632

1359

Acceptancy of Israel's democracy and the promax factors

Rejection of Western culture and the promax factors