Behind the Percentages: Insights into American and Middle-Eastern Students’ Views on Terrorism

By Roberta Fiske-Rusciano, Frank Louis Rusciano, and Ibrahim Saleh

In recent years, many educators, public officials, and political observers have argued that the notion that international affairs is solely the business of experts is incompatible with the healthy functioning of a democracy, particularly one so involved in world affairs as the United States. Researchers have instituted a series of National Issues Forums, or deliberative discussions, around the United States about public issues. One such forum, focusing on the differences between elite and public opinion on foreign policy, has already been described at length in a previous issue of Public Opinion Pros.

A second sought to determine whether deliberative discussions could be carried out internationally among college students using videoconferencing technology. In the course of these discussions, a rare opportunity was provided to explore the reasoning behind survey responses of students from two very different vantage points on the subject of terrorism.

In cooperation with the American University in Cairo, Egypt (AUC), we set up a series of twelve hour-and-a-half videoconferences between a group of Rider University students and a group of the Cairo students.

The eleven Rider students came from different colleges in the institution, including business and liberal arts, sciences, and education; their majors included history, business, political science, biology, and global and multinational studies. The nineteen Cairo students were studying communications, but they hailed from nations all over the Middle East and North Africa, including Egypt, Palestine, Yemen, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and other countries.

The discussions revolved around problems facing the United States and Arab countries, one of which was the question of what Arab nations and the United States should do about international terrorism. For each issue, students at Rider University and the American University in Cairo received instructional materials beforehand and then spent approximately three weeks discussing the problem and the possible solutions, and advancing possible solutions of their own. In the case of terrorism, a questionnaire was administered immediately after the videoconferencing, to compare students’ attitudes and to test the extent to which they agreed upon possible solutions.

It is important to note that since this was a pilot study and the number of participants was small, many of the survey results lacked statistical significance; but the insights gained by these findings in combination with the discussions will inform future studies, both on the views of young people on terrorism and the role of deliberative discussions in exploring them.

Of the several issues discussed during the videoconferencing, none proved more contentious than the definition and causes of terrorism. One reason for the tension was the proximity of both sides to the issue.

In general, the AUC students were very aware of the Western image that equated Islam, and even Arabs themselves, with terrorism. Further, the Middle Eastern students felt there was a double standard whenever terrorism was discussed, since they perceived the Palestinians to be victims of state terrorism by the Israelis.

The Rider students generally associated terrorism with nonstate actors. They also lived almost virtually in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks. Rider University is located in central New Jersey, approximately an hour from New York City and two and a half hours from Washington, D.C. The closest airport is Liberty International (formerly Newark) airport, from which one of the hijacked planes took off. Many students even had friends or relatives who were victims of the attacks.

Rider and AUC students’ conflicting perspectives went far beyond the political impact of 9/11, however. In fact, the discussion of these attacks generated the most heated exchanges between the two groups, and opened the Rider students’ eyes to conversations on what has been typically referred to as “the Arab street,” or the popular opinions assumed in conversation among Arab populations. The AUC students argued two statements as fact: first, that the United States government (perhaps the CIA) had perpetrated the September 11 attacks themselves, in order to provide an excuse for invading Islamic countries like Afghanistan and Iraq; and second, that there were four thousand Israelis who worked in the World Trade Center who were warned by the Israeli intelligence agencies to stay home from work that day.

These statements naturally horrified Rider students. While some allowed that the Bush administration might have used the attacks as a justification for going to war in Iraq without sufficient evidence, Afghanistan, where the Taliban tolerated the presence of Al Qaeda camps, was another story. The Rider students were doubly disturbed to find the AUC students repeating the charge about Israelis working in the WTC, which had been circulated in anti-Semitic circles in the United States and elsewhere. These disagreements framed the discussion and set the stage for significant disagreements about the problem of terrorism.