It's really hard not to notice.
If you make a good living out of exploiting "the fact" that people don't like you, and you do a survey that shows that 1 in 4 don't like you, then the most likely options are that either:
- there is actually something about you that people have a reason not to like; or
- your survey was designed to ensure that you got the response that you wanted (i.e. that a lot of people didn't like you).
If the survey is by an organization like the ADL, I'd tend to favour Option 2.
What, however, would have been really interesting would have been to see:
- a somewhat more nuanced questionnaire (rather than one which asked questions that were the equivalent of "Have you stopped beating your wife yet? [Answer "Yes", "No", or "Refused to say".]); and/or
- the reasons for the responses; and/or
- the demographics of the sample; and/or
- what "normalization" adjustments were made.
Absent those factors, the degree of credibility that should be given to the survey is fairly low (although I would agree that there is SOME level of "anti-semitism" [which is an incorrect term since the Arabs are "Semitic" people as well] in all countries.
Have you wondered what the results would be if the same survey were conducted but with the words "Muslims" and "Muslim" substituted for the words "Jews" and "Jewish"? [HINT - Other than the "degree of control" questions, I'd be prepared to bet that the results would be fairly close to a mirror image.]
You might find
Half of Israelis say negative feelings toward Arabs will never change and
Arab Americans and American Muslims Are at Risk interesting.
You might notice, if you take a look at those two articles, that the Middle East (Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates and Yemen) has (using 2013 data) a population of around 218 million which is about 3% of the total world population while the US has about 5% of the total world population AND that the percentage of "Anti-Jews" in the Middle East is roughly the same as the percentage of "Anti-Muslims" in the US.
If Muslims ever established a
really visible presence in the American cultural, financial, business, and/or manufacturing sectors it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that the percentage of "Anti-Muslim" feeling in the US would be even higher.
Admittedly, there is a much greater feeling of immediacy when you are sitting right next door to the people who don't like you living next to them than there is when you aren't, so I quite understand why you would be more worried about the fact that many Arab/Muslim nations (even those supported by the United States of America) "don't like Jews" than you would be about the fact that the American (and Israels) people "don't like Muslims".
