Arab world’s ratings of Obama, US plummet

Jul 14, 2011
Arab world’s ratings of Obama, US plummet: Poll Two years after US President Barack Obama delivered his groundbreaking speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, his popularity among Arabs has hit a low point.

WASHINGTON – TWO years after US President Barack Obama delivered his groundbreaking speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, his popularity among Arabs has hit a low point, a poll released on Wednesday shows.

An overwhelming majority of more than 4,000 people surveyed in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, told the Arab American Institute that they felt that Mr Obama had not met the expectations he had set forth in the June 2009 Cairo speech, the poll found.

Mr Obama called in his Cairo speech for a ‘new beginning’ to end a cycle of ‘suspicion and discord’ between the United States and the Muslim world In the speech, the US leader laid out a new US blueprint for the Middle East, including a new Palestinian state and efforts to defuse a nuclear showdown with Iran.

But the poll found that Arabs see the Obama administration’s handling of key Middle East policy issues as having made no contribution to improving relations between them and the United States.

In fact, the two issues on which the US administration has invested ‘considerable energy – the Palestinian issue and engagement with the Muslim world – receive the lowest approval ratings,’ the survey found.

Less than nine per cent of the people polled said the Obama administration has handled the two key issues well. The Arab world’s image of the US as a whole has also soured to become even less favourable than during the last year of the administration of president George W. Bush, under whom the United States led an international coalition that invaded Iraq, the survey found. — AFP …source