Reply #20: Poll was poorly conceived [View All]

[pschoeb]

I'm sorry if this is repeating because I didn't have time to read all posts.

In this poll you could only choose from 15 countries, also you could choose as many from the 15 as you wanted.

The question was not if the countries were the biggest threat, merely that they were a threat. here is the question "INSERT COUNTRY does not present a threat to world peace". So it wasn't ranked as how big a threat, just as a threat. Since you could select as many of the 15 as you wanted, you might choose Israel among several other, but really think Israel is less of a threat(but still a threat) to peace than say Iran. So the results really could be summed up as 59% percieve Israel as some kind of threat to world peace.

Also listed as pretty high threats, were Afghanistan and Iraq, it's obvious these countries are not thought to be big threats in themselves, but their situations are considered threats to peace. This is probably the same for Israel. It goes without saying that as long as the I/P conflict continues on it's violent course that there is no world peace, so who is suprised?

An interesting thing on this poll is the results on the US. Many have mentionaed that they thought the EU would/should rank the US a greater threat.

In a way they did, if you notice two of the 15 countries listed are countries occupied by the US, Afghanistan and Iraq, they also ranked very high on percentage chosen as a threat. It's quite conceivable that people voted for these two choices instead of the US directly, depending where they felt the main problem was.

The poll results don't tell us all we would like to know(like what percantage who chose the US also chose Iraq or Afghanistan), but we can make and educated guess by looking at Greece, who voted 88% that the US was a threat, but voted 27% that Iraq was a threat and 23% that Afghanistan was a threat. It seems clear, that if they chose the US, then they didn't choose either of the US occupied countries, and probably vice versa. If Iraq and Afghansiatan had not been listed I would assume that the US would have scored a much higher percentage, because people wouldn't be able to make a distinction.

The same could be true with Israel, since there was no choice to vote on West Bank and Gaza, anyone who thought the I/P situation important could only vote for Israel.

Another very important point, is that depsite asking for an answer that connoted degrees of threat, the result are given as yes or no only.

The allowed responses for the survey question were

Yes, absolutely
Yes, rather
No, rather not
No, absolutely
No Response/Don't know

We only see the results of Yes or No, without the shades of Yes or No.

This original story was a leaked poll result, and no one had seen all the data yet as this was an unpublished EU commision poll. It supposed to be published today(monday).

Here is a link to what I think is the full report
http://europa.eu.int/comm/public_opinion/flash/fl151_iraq_full_report.pdf
but so far there hasn't been a release of the raw data, which might be more interesting.

Patrick Schoeb