Abu Aardvark

"Gaza" or "Hamas"

The other day I pointed out the Arab political divisions over the response to Gaza.   It might be interesting to show how this plays out in one of the key interpretive struggles in the Arab public sphere (and not only Arab, of course):  whether to define the current Israeli attack  as against "Gaza" or "Hamas."  The stakes are clear.  If the attack is defined as against "Gaza", then what follows is solidarity with the Palestinians and demands to stop the killing.   If the attack is defined as against "Hamas", then what follows is the division of Arab opinion along sharply polarized lines defined by their views towards the Islamist movement.   Who's winning? Thus far, "Gaza" in a landslide... but just as in the 2006 Hezbollah war, the 2008 Iraqi Basra campaign, and all other such battles the interpretive struggle will continue long beyond the hostilities. 

The "Hamas" frame is being pushed by Israel, the United States, the Egyptian government, Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas, parts of the Saudi media and generally the familiar quarters of the "official Arab order".  While they can't ignore the destruction in Gaza, their focus is primarily on Hamas's "irresponsibility" for breaking the cease-fire, and on its alleged alliances with a variety of enemies of this official order: Iran, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood.   For example, here's the lead story on the crisis on the Saudi al-Arabiya right now, showcasing Hamas missiles, not suffering Gazans:

 

The competing frame focuses on the mass human suffering at the hands of Israeli military assault and the inaction on the part of Arab governments.  Thus far, the "Hamas" frame has been absolutely swamped by the "Gaza" frame. The visuals in the Arab media show endless pain, sufffering, and trauma for Gazans of all stripes.  Al-Jazeera has taken the lead in pushing the images and the frame, but it is far more pervasive than that -- and extends far, far beyond the "pro-Iran" or "Islamist" forces to which the first camp prefers to assign it.   Almost every newspaper features front page images of devastation in Gaza,  imagery which overwhelms the carefully calculated political arguments of the official Arab camp.     The language of choice throughout the media is "massacre", "slaughter", "assault".   Here are just a few examples from today's editions of Jordan's semi-official al-Rai, Lebanon's al-Safir, and the Saudi pan-Arab al-Hayat: 

 

  It remains to be seen how much this matters, of course, and skepticism runs deep.  Anyone who lived through the fierce protests during the second Intifada in 2000, the Israeli re-occupation of the West Bank in 2002, or the invasion of Iraq in 2003 will remember well the rising force of popular protest at those moments, the expectations of dramatic change, the perception of regimes on the brink, the empowered public opinion, the satellite television arguments, the declarations of the final collapse of the Arab official order.  And here we still are.

I do think that public opinion matters, at least indirectly in terms of shaping the terms of Arab politics, even if governments don't fall, treaties aren't broken or war declared.   A whole industry of 'public diplomacy' and 'wars of ideas' is based on the concern that anti-American attitudes matter, for instance.  Here, the anti-Hamas camp has already been forced to bow to this frame rhetorically, with the Mubarak demanding Israel immediately end its "monstrous" assault, and the GCC calling for an immediate end to the violence.   The limits of their concessions can be seen in the fact that they continue to blame Hamas for the crisis, though, and refuse to do anything substantive in response (calling for an Arab summitt to eventually be held, or photo opportunities of blood donations don't really count).  Their media are trying to portray those governments as acting effectively, but that doesn't seem to be getting much traction with a deeply skeptical and outraged public.   If the crisis grinds on, we'll see whether these regimes are forced to start making more concessions to public views --- but most of the real impact will only be felt long-term.

what the people say? we wanna live it up. what the people want? please deliver us

Shibley Telhami has just released the results of the latest round of his six-nation surveys of Arab public opinion, his first since 2006 (covering Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE).   All the usual disclaimers about survey research in the Arab world apply.  Most headlines will focus on attitudes towards the United States (still, amazingly enough, not positive: 4% claim very favorable views of the US and 11% somewhat favorable - a next increase of 3% on the "somewhat" in the last two years) or the most admired leader (two Shia figures, Hassan Nasrullah (26%) and Mahmoud Ahmedenejad (10%), while  Bashar al-Assad scores 16% - up from 2% in 2006, for some reason, and nobody else cracking double figures - bin Laden's 6% ties him with the most popular Western figure, Nicolas Sarkozy).  As always, I find some of the internal questions more interesting,  especially those which have been asked in consecutive surveys which give some trends.

The questions about Iraq reveal an intriguing combination of skepticism about the current state of affairs but a degree of conditional confidence about the future. There has been little rethinking of past opposition to the war or of its consequences:   81% say that the Iraqi people are worse off than before the war and only 2% say they are better off. Concerns about spreading Iranian power seem to have diminished in salience, however, compared with fears of instability:  only 8% name "Iran is a more powerful state" as one of their two greatest concerns about Iraq, down from 15% in 2006, while 59% say "Iraq will remain unstable and spread instability in the region" (up from 42%).

The respondents do not seem much impressed with the "surge":  36% do not believe the reports about the reduction in violence;  31% say that the reduction in violence is the product of factors unrelated to the surge and it is only a matter of time before violence increases again;  25% say that for whatever reason (American policy or internal developments) Iraq is headed towards a stable political settlement.  That's probably higher than in 2006, though no trend line is given there.    But at the same time, if the US withdraws quickly, then 61% say that Iraqis will find a way to bridge their differences while only 15% believe that civil war will expand rapidl (down from 24% in 2006).

Finally, in both 2006 and 2008, brokering Israeli-Palestinian peace and withdrawing from Iraq were the top two responses to a question about what two things the US could do to improve its image in the region.  But there has been an enormously dramatic shift:  the spread between the two options has dropped from 29% in 2006 to 6% last month.  In 2006, 62% said "broker Israeli-Palestinian peace" and 33% said "withdraw from Iraq", while this year 50% said Israel- Palestine peace while 44% said withdraw from Iraq.  This suggests that while the Palestinian issue remains central, Iraq has become an issue of near-equal salience and force for Arab publics.

A couple of observations about the attitudes towards America, beyond the headline number.  It's disturbing to see the very, very low numbers on questions about where they would prefer to live  (7% say the US) or where they would prefer to see a family member study (11% say the US).  It's also troubling that 20% say that they are not following the US presidential elections while 32% say that the elections make no difference.  The intense Arab interest in the 2004 Presidential election has been a reassuring signal that they believed elections mattered and US policy could change;  if that's changing, it suggests that views have become more entrenched.   Finally, the survey didn't directly ask about Presidential preferences, but instead asked who had "the best chance of advancing peace in the Middle East":  only 4% chose McCain, while 18% rate Obama the highest and 13% Clinton. 

On the media front,  Al-Jazeera remains the runaway favorite:  53% say it is the network whose news broadcasts they watch the most often, with al-Arabiya at 9% and al-Hurra and al-Manar tied at 2%. While this presentation doesn't include the data, I know that the "second choice" data showed that as in the past al-Jazeera remains the one station which virtually everybody watched across the region even when it is not the first choice.   For all the talk of changes at al-Jazeera, respondents did not report any feeling that the station's quality had declined.  There's clear variation across countries.  Al-Jazeera dominates Egypt (55%, with Egyptian networks scoring 31%, al-Arabiya 6%, and al-Hurra 1%) and Morocco (59% AJ, 3% AA, 1% AH).  While al-Jazeera remains the clear leader, the media arena is more balanced in Jordan (46% AJ, 31% AA, 15% AH) and Saudi Arabia (40% AJ, 26% AA, 1% AH).   Lebanon, as always, is its own media creature with a variety of its own intensely competing and stations.   

There's a lot more interesting findings there, including views of the Fatah-Hamas conflict and the Hezbollah-Siniora conflict.   You can download the slides at the above link.

Circus coming to town.

Speaking of unifying and fragmenting the Arab agenda, here's a heads up.  With all that's going on in Gaza and Iraq, the most radically Arabist of the major dailies, al-Quds al-Arabi, manages to devote two of its four op-eds today to the burning question of Salman Rushdie's possible Knighthood.  Thus far it doesn't seem to be getting much play on al-Jazeera or al-Arabiya (no stories on their websites right now, at least), but give it a little time.  Wouldn't surprise me a bit if other Arab media (especially Saudi) quickly figures out that this will be a neat way to distract attention from their unpopular positions towards Gaza, et al.    All we need now is some cartoons to really get a circus going. 

Arab agenda: fragmenting or unifying?

One rule of thumb which I developed over the last few years for assessing trends in Arab public opinion with regard to US policy was to look at the extent to which the Arab agenda was unified around a single issue or fragmented into a more inward focus on local concerns. This is something which can be tracked empirically, which I've done routinely over the last few years by keeping track of the topics of al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya programs (since they are the two most-viewed TV stations with a region-wide audience) and the content of major Arab op-ed pages.   It's one of the things I'm doing now to try and grapple with the questions raised by Mohamed Abu Roman yesterday - and it's a chance to test one of my hypotheses (sorry, political science speak there.. won't happen again).

In archetypical examples of a unified agenda - Palestine in 2000, Iraq in 2003, and the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war - these Arab op-ed pages and talk shows overwhelmingly focused on a single issue, driving out almost everything else (at the height of each crisis, well over 50% of all al-Jazeera talk shows focused on it). Sometimes everyone more or less agreed, sometimes they bitterly disagreed - but they were all talking about the same thing.   In 2005, by contrast, the agenda divided around a variety of different, more local issues - elections in various Arab countries, terrorism in specific countries, the Hariri assassination, developments in Iraq, etc.   

This matters because a unified agenda almost invariably heightens the salience of anti-Americanism, since it tends to focus attention at a level where the US is a common denominator, and on issues where American policy is deeply unpopular.  A fragmented agenda tended to reduce the salience of anti-Americanism, since the US is less likely to be the most important element in local electoral politics or the like.   That's one of the reasons that I've suggested that American public diplomacy is often better served by standing back, rather than doing more and inserting itself in every issue:  Jordanians turned against Zarqawi after the Amman hotel bombings because it was a local, nationalist atrocity and not because they suddenly became convinced by the logic of American arguments. 

So to predict where Arab public opinion is headed, we should look at whether the Arab agenda is fragmenting or unifying.    With three simultaneous crises - Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq - fragmentation might seem like the most likely outcome.  But I've been seeing a very strong underlying unifying trend, with the juxtaposition of "Gaza, Beirut and Baghdad" within a single narrative.  Sometimes the United States is identified as the common denominator, sometimes it's the absence of real democracy, sometimes it's the prevalence of pernicious ideologies of resistance, sometime's it is external actors like Iran.  It isn't just al-Jazeera - the theme is increasingly prevalent even in the Saudi-owned media like al-Arabiya, al-Sharq al-Awsat, and al-Hayat, which have generally taken a strong anti-Hamas, anti- Hezbollah, and anti-Iran stance.   

The implication of this analysis is that the more that a unifying frame takes hold, placing the various regional crises into a single grand narrative, the more likely that it will trigger anti-American attitudes and popular hostility to American foreign policy - even if a sizable portion of the analysis is anti-Hamas, anti-Hezbollah, and sympathetic to American policy.    So I'm tracking the 'unified narrative' theme right now - will keep you updated if anything significant develops on that front.

Abu Roman: Hamas losing the media war

Mohamed Abu Roman, a very sharp and independent-minded Jordanian political analyst with good insights into Islamist politics, writes today that Hamas has for the first time in its existence lost the Arab media war.  The images from Gaza, he writes, have cost it the reputation with the mainstream Arab public cultivated over decades.  Images broadcast over satellite TV stations of Hamas fighters ransacking Fatah offices, and of the dead bodies of Fatah men killed by Hamas, shocked Arab viewers.  Abu Roman suggests that the images link up in Arab minds with the images of death and destruction from Iraq, forging the impression that such horrors are the future which Islamists have to offer.  Islamists, such as the Jordanian and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, continue to strongly support Hamas, but Hamas has been badly hurt with the average, mainstream Arab - religious but not Islamist, identifies strongly with Palestinians, feels terrible about Iraq, resents American foreign policy.  That "median Arab voter", as I've put it, has generally strongly supported Hamas over the years, but now seems to be turning against it.  He quotes two respected and independent Jordanian columnists - Hilmi al-Asmar (who used to be the editor of the Muslim Brotherhood's newspaper) and Fahd al-Khitan - making similar arguments about Hamas losing the war of images and the media battle. This dissatisfaction with Hamas extends to other Islamist movements, argues Abu Roman, and he expects it to hurt the Muslim Brotherhood in upcoming Jordanian elections.

I'm not at all sure that I agree with Abu Roman. I remember a similar argument being made in the early days of the Israel-Lebanon war, and I suspect that the same dynamics are in play.   It really depends on which Arab media you mean -  watching al-Jazeera and the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya is like watching two different sets of events unfolding.  The official media of America's allies (especially Jordan and Saudi Arabia) have been heavily pushing the narrative blaming Hamas, to be sure, in line with their current foreign policy interests.  Those Arab governments have been as hostile to Hamas as they were to Hezbollah in the early days of the Lebanon-Israel war.  But elsewhere I've seen an awful lot of Arab op-eds and pundits pushing a narrative blaming the United States, linking together Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine into a single storyline driven by American actions (today's article by the influential Fahmy Howeydi, for instance).  Contrary to Abu Roman's reading, within this narrative the cumulative horror of those images of death and destruction are more likely attributed to the United States than to the Islamists, and would strengthen rather than weaken their appeal. That analysis dwells far more on the American-led boycott of the Hamas government, and Israel's various campaigns against it such as the arrest of Hamas Parliamentarians, when telling the story of recent events.  When Mahmoud Abbas is put in the company of Siniora and Maliki, this does not help him in this political milieu.   

Which narrative takes root remains very much to be seen.   Perhaps Abu Roman is right about Hamas losing the support of the Arab center.  But my gut tells me that the pro-Hamas line is far more likely to capture Arab discourse than is the US and Saudi-backed anti-Hamas line, particularly as public American and Israeli support for Abbas increases.  I expect ever sharper polarization between the official line and the wider mass public, as we saw in the Lebanon crisis, rather than the center clearly breaking in a pro-Fatah direction.  But we'll see.

Muslim-Americans: what's important

Pew just released the results of the first serious study of Muslim-American attitudes.  It found Muslim Americans "to be largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world."   It released the report under the title "Muslim Americans:  Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream." 

A lot of the commentary I've seen, however, has gravitated to one question:  support for suicide bombing. 

But when asked the question, "Can suicide bombings of civilian targets to defend Islam be justified?", 13 percent of those ages 18-29 said "sometimes," 11 percent said "rarely," and 2 percent said "often." In all, one in four young U.S. Muslims surveyed agreed that suicide bombing of civilians was at times acceptable. (In contrast, among Muslims 30 and older, 6 percent said "sometimes" or "often," and 3 percent said "rarely.")

Coverage of the Pew survey features many headlines like "Some American Muslims say suicide attacks okay" (AP),  "Poll finds some US Muslim support for suicide attacks" (Reuters), and "Are US Muslims cool with suicide bombing?" (Washington Post).   26% of young Muslim Americans saying that suicide bombings are sometimes justifiable is certainly something to which we should pay attention.    But some context, please.   Look at the results when Pew has asked the same question among Muslims in a number of other countries:

It isn't even close:  American Muslims are by far the least supportive of suicide bombing out of any group of Muslims in any country surveyed (except Germany which was similar):  13% say rarely, sometimes, or often.   The same question got 24% for the Spanish and 25% for the British. Only German Muslims are overall significantly less likely to support suicide bombing than young American Muslims (British and Spanish about the same) - with the young generally more radical than their elders.  Pew concluded that "absolute levels of support for Islamic extremism among Muslim Americans are quite low, especially when compared with Muslims around the world."   It would be nice to see that dimension of the survey covered as heavily as the more alarmist reading, since the large moderate majority would seem to be at least as important as the more radical minority.

update - just to point out credit where due:  the Washington Post story today ran under the headline "US Muslims Assimilated, Opposed to Extremism", and in a stunning coincidence explicitly makes the comparison to the other Pew surveys featured in this post.  Bravo.  Also, text slightly corrected above - I used the figure for "over 30" (9%) instead of the total aggregate (13%)  by mistake; doesn't change the point.

New Muslim Public Opinion Survey

PIPA has just released the results of another major public opinion survey in four Muslim countries (Egypt, Indonesia, Morocco, and Pakistan).   The survey is unusually interesting, with some very well-designed questions.  Overall, the survey strongly supports the notion that al-Qaeda's "frame" has made great inroads even if the organization itself has not:  strikingly high percentages of Arabs (especially) have come to share key elements of the al-Qaeda worldview, which represents considerable success for what I've called "al-Qaeda's constructivist strategy."   At the same time, there are important nuances in these views which should be recognized.

Egypt is the most interesting of the countries for me, though all of course are important. Only 25% of Egyptians say that they agree with al-Qaeda's goals and its attacks on Americans, while 31% say they agree with al-Qaeda's views of America but not its attacks on Americans (31% say they disagree with both). Only 15% consider attacks on civilians for political purposes to be justified, and 88% consider groups which commit such attacks (such as al-Qaeda, named in the question) to be violating the principles of Islam.  Only 8% say that attacks on civilians in the United States or American citizens working in Islamic countries would be justified (and only 4% say the same about Europeans).   I've argued in numerous forums that a narrowly defined 'war of ideas' - focusing specifically on delegitimizing the use of violence against civilians for political ends - was very winnable.   These results demonstrate this quite graphically. 

But this 'narrow' success doesn't necessarily translate up to a higher political plane.  Even as most Egyptians rejected terrorist methods, only 20% expressed negative feelings about Osama bin Laden personally. 91% of Egyptians approve of attacks on American soldiers in Iraq.  Egyptians strongly supported most of the specific goals associated with al-Qaeda, despite their ambivalence about the organization itself or its methods.    90% said they supported the goal of "standing up to America and affirming the dignity of the  Islamic people."  91% want to "keep Western values out of Islamic countries."  92% agree that the US goal is to weaken and divide the Islamic world, and only 9% think that the US-led war on terror is intended primarly to protect the US from terrorism. 45% see a clash of civilizations as inevitable (by far the highest of any of the four countries surveyed).    In short, the al-Qaeda worldview - of a world divided between clashing civilizations and Islam under a comprehensive assault from the West - seems widely spread and increasingly entrenched.

In the domestic sphere, the survey - like all other comparable surveys - shows very strong support for democracy alongside strong support for more Islamic government.  74% support the strict application of sharia law, while 67% supported the idea of establishing an Islamic caliphate.  But 92% view economic interdependence and global communications favorably.  82% view democracy favorably.   88% say that "people of any religion should be free to worship according to their own beliefs".  What these findings suggest is that whatever Western scholars conclude about the compatibility of Islamism and democracy, Egyptians do not seem to see any intrinsic conflict.   

There is a lot more of interest in this survey, and interested readers should most definitely study the findings themselves. 

The exoneration of Serbia

The ICJ's ruling that Serbia was not responsible for genocide in Bosnia (even if it "could have and should have prevented it") has absolutely infuriated Muslims across the world.  Faisal al-Qassem's extremely popular talk show The Opposite Direction covered it last Tuesday.  I've seen a slew of op-eds and stories in the Arab newspapers and considerable coverage on Arab TV stations, across the political spectrum.  Ayman al-Zawahiri led with it in his tape the other day - before he got into the Palestine stuff - showing that al-Qaeda thinks the issue will resonate.

AFP picture, as presented on alArabiya.net

Outrage is the order of the day.  The overwhelming theme is that it demonstrates the hypocrisy and lack of credibility of international tribunals.  It has insistently been compared to the Darfur tribunal:  Why so much attention to Darfur, they ask, while the Serbs get off and Palestinians are ignored (you can get a whiff of this from Mahmood Mamdani's controversial LRB essay)?  Because the Sudan is Muslim and the Serbs are Christian, they respond.  Why are Muslims brought before these tribunals while Bush, Blair, Sharon, et al have nothing to fear?  Asked and answered.  And how can the United States ask the ICC to judge Darfur, they ask, when it doesn't even accept the Court's jurisdiction over itself? 

Expect this to become another oft-cited point in the narrative of Muslim grievances against the West, and to fuel al-Qaeda's 'clash of civilizations' frame.  Bosnia has always been an area where American and Muslim perceptions have been almost 100% at odds.   Most Americans seem to see Bosnia as an example of the United States coming to the aid of Muslims against Christians, and hold it against Muslims that they don't appreciate this.  Most Muslims seem to see Bosnia as an example of the United States taking three years to do anything, allowing hundreds of thousands of Muslims to be butchered while not even allowing Bosnia to import weapons to defend themselves and the intervention coming far too late.  That's the context for Muslim anger over this international ruling.   

That many, many Americans and Westerners will also be outraged by the ruling won't matter much... though making it clear might help a bit.  Lead war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte has complained that Europe has been disappointingly "muted" in its response, though, slamming Javier Solana and Germany (current EU President).  And the US has been far worse - another massive public diplomacy failure unfolding before our eyes.     The State Department spokesman's response -  "we would hope that the people of the region use this as an opportunity to reconcile themselves to the past and also to take advantage of this time to continue efforts at that reconciliation" - is downright insulting and seems calculated to be inflammatory in Muslim ears.  "Get over it" is hardly what those who consider themselves to have suffered a genocide and have just received an international ruling that those they consider guilty have been exonerated want to hear.   This isn't just a moral failing or a miscommunication... it's a serious policy failure at a time when the US wants an international court to deal with Darfur and to improve its image in the Muslim world. 

BBC Islam/West Survey

I just recorded a bit for BBC Newshour on a new 27 nation survey of international public opinion on relations between Islam and the West (apologies to the BBC if I'm ahead of the embargo, I can never keep track of "real" time when I'm in the Gulf... if this is too early, please don't read it!).   The poll, done by Steve Kull's PIPA (University of Maryland), asked whether conflict between Islam and the West was driven by political or cultural forces.  The results were quite interesting.  Worldwide, 52% say that political differences cause the tensions, compared to only 29% who say cultural differences - suggesting that the clash of civilizations narrative isn't catching on as badly as it might.   What is more, 58% say that intolerant or extremist minorities are causing the tensions, against 26% who see fundamental religious or cultural differences.    The findings aren't all good:  a solid 36% of Egyptians and 38% of Americans saw "differences of religion/culture" as the cause of the tensions, while 39% of Egyptians (but only 17% of Americans) saw a "fundamental difference between the two cultures" which put both key countries close to the top of the list (Nigeria was the outlier, with 56% saying culture).   On the BBC show, I warned against reading this as meaning that the differences are "just" political, though:  the fears and critiques of American hegemonic aspirations in the Muslim world is becoming universal and deep enough to transcend easy political solutions, as important as those political causes are;  and even small minorities are easily capable of exploiting existing mistrust and fears.  But overall the general thrust of the BBC report offers some rare good news, and holds out some hope that good sense might still prevail on this question in much of the world.   

New Telhami/Zogby Arab public opinion survey

Shibley Telhami has released the results of the 2006 round of his surveys (PDF file; done with Zogby International) of public opinion in six Arab countries.  He's been doing this with the same six countries for six years now: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Morocco, and the UAE.  Among the major findings:

• Views of the United States haven't improved.  57% say they have very unfavorable views of America and 21% somewhat unfavorable;  8% say somewhat favorable and 4% very favorable. Asked which two countries pose the greatest threat to them, 74% 72% (see below) chose the United States. Bush remains the most disliked world leader, by far - 38% chose him.  When asked which country they would prefer to be the single superpower in a unipolar world, 19% chose France, 16% chose China, 14% chose Pakistan (!), 10% chose Germany, and only 8% chose the United States. 7% chose Russia.  Only 14% chose the US as one of two countries where people enjoy the most freedom and democracy.  Only 9% chose the US as the country other than their own where they would most like to live (France was #1 by far, at 33%).  And this is especially troubling to me:  I have argued in the past that one indication that Arab attitudes hadn't hardened and could still be influenced was the intense interest in American electoral politics, which suggested that Arabs thought the elections actually mattered and that hated American policies could change.  In this poll, 58% think that the Democratic Party's electoral victories in 2006 will make no difference in American policies in the region;  only 16% think that it will make a positive difference.   
• The anti-Shia hysteria might be exaggerated. Only 11% (see below) 6% chose Iran as one of the two biggest threats to their country, despite months of anti-Iranian agitation in much of the Arab media and a concerted American effort to midwife a 'coalition of moderate Sunnis' against Iran.  Hezbollah's very Shia leader Hassan Nasrallah remains the most admired world leader, despite all the talk of Hezbollah's plunging popularity, and Mahmoud Ahmednejad is #3 (Chirac is #2).  Nasrallah is #1 in every Arab country surveyed (Lebanese couldn't choose him) except one:  Saudi Arabia. That's pretty interesting, and fits with the general sense of the Saudi origins of much of the current anti-Shia hysteria.
• Iraq:  No surprises here.  87% think that Iraqis are worse off now than they were before the US invaded Iraq.  81% think the war made the region less peaceful, 80% think that it increased terrorism, and 69% think that it made the region less democratic. 
• Islamism:  45% said that "Muslim" was the most important aspect of their identity, compared to 29% who said "citizen of my country" and 20% who said "Arab."  I don't have the earlier studies at hand, but that seems a lot higher "Muslim" than before - which would be another data point in favor of the argument that al-Qaeda is succeeding at the level of spreading its basic worldview, even as only 7% say that they agree with al-Qaeda's goal of creating an Islamic state and only 11% support its methods.   
  
• Al-Jazeera still rules the Arab media.  Asked which network's news broadcasts they watched most often for international news, 54% said al-Jazeera. Various Egyptian networks were next at  12%, the Saudi MBC got 11%, and only 5% said al-Arabiya, offering scant support for claims that the two stations are close rivals across the region.  Saudi Arabia is the only market in which al-Jazeera is not the leader:  the Saudi MBC places first there at 30%, then al-Jazeera at 24%, then al-Arabiya at 11%.  In the other five countries, al-Jazeera finishes first, with more than 50% and an average advantage of over 45 percentage points in four of the six countries (62% in Egypt and 64% in Jordan) .   1% said the American al-Hurra, which might actually be an improvement.

There's a lot more detail, but it's late.

UPDATE:  the Anwar Sadat Center, under whose auspices Shibley Telhami conducts these surveys,  has contacted me to let me know that they made an error in their preliminary calculations on the question "which two countries pose the greatest threat".   The correct figure for the United States is 72%, not 74%;  and the correct figure for Iran is 11%, not 6%.   (Israel is #1 at 85% in the corrected calcuations).   

UPDATE 2:  thanks to MSK in comments, here are the trend-lines on the question about the choice of "Muslim" as the most important aspect of identity:     2004: 24% Muslim / 41% Citizen, 2005: 32% vs. 45%, 2006: 45% vs. 29%.   That's a 21% percentage point increase in two years, and near-reversal of the ratio between Muslim/Citizen.  I didn't mean to imply, as one commenter complained, that prioritizing Islamic identity necessarily means "al-Qaeda" (hopefully I've written enough about the variety of Islamic activism over the years to put that into context), but highlighting the Islamic aspect of identity and placing that identity in confrontation with the West is explicitly a key part of al-Qaeda's strategy and this trend suggests that it's happening.