Ben Smith repeats an egregious lie based on a single poll question. (via memeorandum)
The survey, by Jim Gerstein, asked Israelis (both Jewish and Muslim) whether a series of terms describe President Obama well, and 39% of respondents said the term “Muslim” describes the president, who is Christian, well. Of those, only 15% said the term described him very well.
A plurality, 49%, said Obama isn’t well-described as a Muslim.
But in a country engaged in decades of violent conflict with its Muslim and Arab neighbors, the fact that well over a third of Israelis buy into the groundless rumors about Obama’s faith suggests the depth of his image problems.
During the campaign there was a tendency to portray Jewish voters as being excessively concerned with Israel and susceptible to false rumors about Barack Obama’s background because of that concern. It was a way of imputing both prejudice and dual loyalty to Jews. In the end these suggestion turned out to have been very wrong as 78% of Jews voted for the President.
I really didn’t pay attention to the rumors, I thought that someone who was friendly with and seemed to agree with Rashid Khalidi was someone who would not have Israel’s best interests at heart.
But if you look at the poll, this was a single question. It was buried in a series of similar questions. But when I looked over the poll, I didn’t find the question straightforward either. I have no idea how it would have been phrased in Hebrew, but it’s possible that this wasn’t based on a rumor as much as finding the question to be confusing.
I also think that something else may have been at play here. Since Barack Obama’s father was Muslim, Muslims would believe him to be Muslim. In other words, someone who was aware of the President’s background might well have characterized him as a Muslim by birth, which would have been a correct response to the question.
But there was an agenda to the poll that Noah Pollak was quick to observe:
The JPost poll was conducted among Jewish Israelis. Gerstein, however, polled everyone, including Arabs, who comprised 16 percent of his sample (an under-sampling, actually — almost 20 percent of Israelis are Arab). More important, he did not ask the same, or even a similar, question. He asked a question that was sure to make Obama look better than the previous poll: not whether the respondent thought that the Obama administration was pro-Israel, but whether the respondent had warm feelings toward Barack Obama personally.
This is where the poll found a 41 percent “favorable rating†for Obama. But having warm feelings toward a politician is not the same thing as approving of his performance in office. The exact same phenomenon has been documented in numerous polls of Americans, who consistently give Barack Obama higher approval marks than his policies.
Pollak argues that the poll was taken to show that President Obama was more popular in Israel than indicated in an earlier poll. I also think that this poll was designed to show support in Israel for J-Street’s extreme positions, hardly surprising since it was conducted by Jim Gerstein, a founder of J-Street.
Worse, the questions in the poll work from an assumption that if Israel would only make enough concessions, it would have peace. Palestinian politics has demonstrated that that premise is false.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
I note that the question was not whether or not the respondant believed he was a Muslim, but if the term described him well. There are probably Xians who could be described as Muslims. In any case, it depends on the definition. I do not think that a naive, weak, inexperenced, fool who cannot bring himself to actually act can really be described as “Muslim”.