The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terror (START) is a US Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence that claims to have the goal of improving the understanding of the origins, dynamics and social and psychological impacts of terrorism. Research done by the START (www.start.umd.edu) team, based at the University of Maryland, College Park, is supposed to provide insight about how and why terrorist groups form, about the decisions and behaviors of individual terrorists and terrorist groups, and about how societies can best respond to and prepare for known and unknown terrorist threats.
Last week START released a report titled, “Muslim Public Opinion on US Policy, Attacks on Civilians and Al-Qaeda.” The report was based on public opinion surveys from Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan and Morocco and was conducted in partnership with the Program on International Policy Attitudes and its WorldPublicOpinion.org project.
The report provides findings on three separate themes: Views of US foreign policy; views of attacks on civilians; and, views of Al-Qaeda and its goals. In Morocco and Indonesia, the survey was done with both an urban and rural sample. In Pakistan only the results of the urban sample are presented. The survey team stated that rural respondents to the survey were “unfamiliar” with many of the issues in the survey. In Egypt only the urban population was surveyed.
One of the questions asked to the survey’s respondents was whether it was a good idea to try “to push the United States to stop providing support to such governments as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.” The question asked of Egyptians was worded slightly differently in that Egypt was not named. While the report has been distributed without an executive summary that extrapolates findings of the survey to form conclusions, it is only a matter of time before such conclusions are drawn, whether by START or by others.