Pew Poll: Mixed, Decreasing Support for Hamas and Hezbollah

A newly released Pew Poll has some interesting new data on opinions from 25 Middle Eastern countries.

Hamas: Numbers show positive support for Hamas in Jordan (56 percent) and Egypt (52 percent) but interestingly enough, 52 percent of Palestinians rated the group negatively over 44 percent who rated them positively. Even more interesting is that only 37 percent of Gazans favored Hamas as opposed to 47 percent in the West Bank. Turkish respondents only gave Hamas 5 percent of its support.

Hezbollah: 63 percent of Palestinians and 51 percent of Jordanians rated Hezbollah positively – but the group did not poll as high in Egypt (43 percent) and actually rated the lowest in Lebanon (34 percent). However, in Lebanon, not surprisingly Hezbollah’s support was specific to religious divides. Nearly all of Lebanon’s Shia Muslims (97 percent) were in favor of the group, compared to only 18 percent of Lebanese Christians and 2 percent of Lebanese Sunni Muslims. Like Hamas, Hezbollah received very little support among Turks (3 percent).

Noah Pollack concludes at Commentary, “The good news is that Muslims in the Middle East tend not to like the Islamists in their own countries. The bad news is that they tend to like the Islamists in other countries.”  Although it is worth noting that Hamas and Hezbollah are very different from most “Islamist” groups in the region, which are unarmed.

This polling data was released last week, though the surveys were conducted between May and June of 2009. Click here to access a full PDF version of the report, which also includes polling numbers on views of Muslim leaders, the Sunni-Shia conflict and Lebanon’s growing divide.