Shifting Attitudes

I found this Table on The Economist’s website. It’s part of an interesting article about how the idea of “resistance” is slowly losing grounds among Moslems everywhere. The graph shows the attitude changes in selected countries, but I was particularly impressed by how Lebanon has fared in the last three years.

According to the table, in the Summer of 2002, 73% of the Lebanese thought that it was often/sometimes ok to use violence against civilians. That figure went down to 39% in July 2005. a whopping 34-point shift.

The popularity of Bin Laden has also taken a nose dive: While 14% of Lebanese had a lot/some confidence in Bin Laden in the Summer of 2002, only 2% thought so in July 2005. (still a scary figure but compare that to Jordan’s 60 percent and you get the picture).

What do you think the reasons of such shifts are? do you think that Hariri’s Assassination had anything to do with the Lebanese figures? What other factors can we think of? Are the figures a good indicator of Hezbollah’s declining popularity?

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