Today, the Wall Street Journal proclaims, “A Donald Trump Surprise.” Together with NBC, the Journal called up a thousand likely Republican primary voters and asked them which of nine candidates they preferred. Among the nine potential candidates was Donald Trump, of bankruptcy and Home Alone 2 fame. Surprisingly to the Journal, Trump tied for second with Mike Huckabee on 17%, trailing only Mitt Romney at 21%.

A result like this is an example of how polls do not simply reflect public opinion, but in fact shape how and what people are thinking. Why would two of America’s largest media companies spend good money to find out whether Republicans would vote for Trump? He is patently unqualified to be President, he has never served the public in any way, and he wouldn’t be able to get elected president of a golf club (unless he owned it). Sarah Palin is ten times the candidate that Trump is.

With the Trump poll, the Wall Street Journal has bought itself a juicy story and lots of attention. Hundreds of domestic and international media outlets have already reported their findings, and perhaps, started a brief national conversation.

Can Trump win? Will Trump win? The answer is no. Let us not confuse the 17% his celebrity earned him in a weak field with any kind of popular support, decisive in all political battles.

What this poll reveals is the dire state of the Republican ideology. That Donald Trump is mentioned in the same sentence as the other candidates must warm Barack Obama’s heart. Even in the midst of economic disaster, the Republican Party has been unable to mount a serious challenge for the White House.

The WSJ/NBC poll may create controversy, but does not address reality. On November 6, 2012, will anyone pull the lever for President Donald Trump?

Originally posted at blog.urtak.com

Canadians are proud of their country.

We are proud that Canada entered the second world war in 1939 and not 1941. We are proud that after that war, Canada played an important role in creating the United Nations.

We are proud that at the United Nations, it was a Canadian diplomat, Lester B. Pearson who was the first to implement the concept of peacekeeping, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957.

We are proud that in 1971, the Canadian government introduced the policy of multiculturalism, and that today Canada welcomes more immigrants per capita than any other rich country.

We are proud that throughout the 1990s, Canada’s standard of living was acknowledged by the UN to be the highest in the world.

And we are proud that in 2003, our government refused to participate in the illegal invasion of Iraq.

But today, I am ashamed of my country.

I am ashamed that during last June’s G20 summit in Toronto, my city was militarized, citizens were brutalized, and we witnessed the largest mass arrests in our country’s history.

I am ashamed that alone among the Western democracies, our government allowed one of our fellow citizens, Omar Khadr, to rot in the U.S. torture prison of Guantanamo.

I am ashamed that Canada has become the “dirty old man of the climate world,” destroying the hope for a global climate change agreement, in order to pursue the environmentally destructive exploitation of Alberta’s tar sands.

And yesterday I was horrified to learn that Canada’s policy is to continue to support the tyrant Hosni Mubarak, when even the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, all agree that the oppression of the Egyptian people must finally come to an end.

I was taught in Canadian schools that our country was a force for good in the world.

Today I am ashamed to repeat that claim.

This morning, the Drudge Report blared the following message to its audience of millions: “SHOCK POLL: Kucinich Challenger within 4 points!”

Could it be that Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, the leader of American social democracy, will be swept out of office on the wave of anti-Obama sentiment? It was worth a closer look.

“Dennis menaced?” reads the blog post on The Weekly Standard. The author is William Kristol, Dr. Frankenstein to Sarah Palin, and famously a journalist too lazy to hold down his job at the New York Times.

We learn that according to a new poll, which only The Weekly Standard has been allowed to see, Republican challenger Peter Corrigan trails the incumbent by just 4 points. But after the respondents were told of Kucinich’s “ties to corrupt local Democratic leaders” and “support for illegal immigration,” that 4 point deficit became a 4 point lead. Say it ain’t so!

Kristol assures us that the poll’s minuscule sample size of 319 respondents is “small but respectable.” Unfortunately, size does matter. The stated margin of error of ±5.6% means that statistically speaking, there is no difference between the results reported. If the exact same poll were conducted again, it would even be possible for Kucinich to gain support from his “ties to corrupt local Democratic leaders.”

As previously noted, only The Weekly Standard has been given access to this poll. We have no way of knowing how questions were worded, what order they were asked in, who makes up the sample, or even whether the poll was conducted in person, by phone, or online. This is lamentable but not necessarily uncommon practice. What is unusual is that nowhere is the polling company that conducted the survey named. There is no accountability in this report.

Is it possible that the firm that conducted the poll is Public Opinion Strategies, Peter Corrigan’s private pollster, cited in a previous Weekly Standard article? If so, not only is the information coming from a biased source, but also an inept one – Public Opinion Strategies is ranked 59th out of 62 in Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings.

By presenting Kucinich as a beatable adversary, Kristol hopes to make it easier for Corrigan to raise money, which would certainly make the incumbent’s life more difficult. His post is a clear example of a poll being used as a tool to create public opinion.

It is possible that William Kristol will be successful in galvanizing opposition to one of the nation’s most left-wing congressmen. But considering that Nate Silver’s forecast gives Kucinich a 99% chance of victory, what is more likely is that he will waste his allies’ money on a doomed cause.

Cross posted at blog.urtak.com

How does The Star know? It’s simple. Lorne Bozinoff, president of the little-known polling firm Forum Research, Inc. told them. Forum Research conducted a telephone poll of 405 Torontonians over the weekend and supplied the results exclusively to the Star.

The Star gives the results as a percentage of decided voters.

George Smitherman: 29%
Rob Ford: 26%
Sarah Thomson: 17%
Joe Pantalone: 12%
Rocco Rossi: 10%
Giorgio Mammoliti: 4%.

The Star then informs that since the poll’s margin of error is 4.9%, 19 times out of 20, Ford and Smitherman are statistically tied. This is problematic. Since Bozinoff points out that 44% of voters are undecided, that means that only about 227 of the 405 respondents actually expressed a preference, and that the margin of error of the results of this subsample is considerably higher.

For a margin of error of 4.9%, all opinions should be represented, which would look like this:

George Smitherman: 16%
Rob Ford: 15%
Sarah Thomson: 10%
Joe Pantalone: 7%
Rocco Rossi: 6%
Giorgio Mammoliti: 2%
Undecided: 44%

Bozinoff not only supplies this article’s facts but also the bulk of its analysis. He claims that it shows, “It’s a dogfight between Ford and Smitherman — they are well ahead of the others.”

This is demonstrably false. Since a poll’s swing can be either plus or minus, it becomes clear that the real story is that no candidate has any significant public support, and that five months away from election day, all the candidates (even Mammoliti), are within striking distance of one another.

Bozinoff also makes a comment about Ford’s support in the area of Etobicoke. Given that Etobicoke represents 13% of Toronto’s population, we can assume that it represents 13% of a diligent pollster’s sample. In this case, that would be about 53 people. That is a very small number of opinions from which to be drawing conclusions so confidently.

All of this makes the critical reader want to take a closer look at the poll’s results. What were the questions asked? In what order? And what is the demographic makeup of the sample? The Star has not made this information available to its readers, and a visit to forumresearch.com turns up no data either. Readers of the Star (including the author) are left having to take these opinion facts on faith.

In the Star’s article, David Rider proves himself an uncritical reporter, and Lorne Bozinoff a pollster with a poor command of his own numbers. They do not inspire trust.

This inaccurate and incomplete piece of journalism is a disservice to the city of Toronto. It can be argued that it does more to shape public opinion than it does to reflect it. To defend its credibility, the Star must make the full results of its polls available to the public and explain why it has printed and distributed these errors to hundreds of thousands of people.

Is the Toronto Star Duping its Readers?

The results of the first round of the presidential election showed that Colombia’s institutional political reality is unchanged. Juan Manuel Santos, oligarch of Bogotá, in alliance with the media, military, and landowning notables, can command almost seven million votes, a total that virtually guarantees his accession to power. An administration more Uribista than outgoing president Álvaro Uribe’s is a likely outcome.

Being the head of state of Colombia does not imply executive power over the whole national territory. Since the 1960s, large swathes of the country have been under the control of various guerrilla movements, the most prominent and powerful of which are the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

The Colombian state and the FARC have been unable to negotiate an end to their eternal war. The FARC, therefore, cannot participate in constitutional politics. This means that an important segment of Colombian opinion (those that support the FARC) will necessarily be unrepresented in any electoral contest. Whatever objections one might have to the policies and actions of the FARC, it is impossible to deny that no organization could hold out for so long against the might of the Colombian armed forces, which are armed, financed, and trained by the U.S., unless it had some degree of real popular support.

As I have argued before, the Colombian pollsters have no interest in finding out what rural Colombians think. It is doubtful that they are even aware that those who live under the authority of the FARC exist at all. We ourselves, por ahora, do not have the capacity to extend our technology to them either. So we have no opinion information about those who back the FARC.

We do have however, a tremendous repository of opinion information, lasillavacia.com‘s massively successful collaborative poll. The participants in this Urtak were overwhelmingly Mockus supporters, who believed him to be fundamentally a politician of the center-right. If there is ever going to be a settlement to Colombia’s civil war, the positions of these people, the moderates, will be decisive.

What then, did lasillavacia.com’s participants tell us about the FARC? Here is a selection:

77% believe the FARC would be better fought with a pencil than with a weapon.

77% believe Hugo Chávez has links with the FARC.

75% believe the FARC are principally a group of drug traffickers.

69% believe that the FARC were justified when they first took up arms.

61% believe that a policy of drug decriminalization could be as effective as a military solution to the FARC problem.

40% would continue to fight the FARC in the same way as Uribe.

35% believe the guerrilla movement has a political or social reason for being.

8% believe that the guerrilla movement can be finished by simply killing the guerrillas.

Colombia’s Other State – June 8, 2010

The response to Terre’Blanche’s murder has been educational. His political party, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), immediately laid the blame on one man, Julius Malema, and vowed vengeance. The English-speaking press has thoroughly investigated this line. Articles in the Telegraph, the BBC, the South African Sunday Times, the New York Times, and the Globe and Mail, have all repeated comments about Malema’s perceived role. This raises two questions. Who is Julius Malema, and what has he done to deserve this?

Julius Malema is the 29-year-old leader of the ruling ANC’s Youth League. He is the loudest critic of the continuing and disproportionate economic power held by the nation’s white minority. This stance, together with his apparently flashy lifestyle, has won him hatred, fear, and ridicule from the South African elite. It has also made him hugely popular among the nation’s poor, and given him a large power base within his party. The current president, Jacob Zuma, would never have been able to oust the very business-friendly Thabo Mbeki without Malema’s decisive support.

Lately, Malema has has been in the habit of singing an old anti-Apartheid song whose lyrics include a call to shoot Boers. To criticize his song-selection as inappropriate is fair, but those who do so should remember that the violent political song has a long and noble tradition in Western democracies, as anyone acquainted with the Marseillaise or John McCain’s cover of the Beach Boys would know. Malema might be making a political error, but to blame him for creating a culture of violence in South Africa is to attribute to the young man powers he does not possess. When he sings “shoot the Boer,” he is doing nothing more than representing a powerful sentiment in South African opinion.

In fact, if anyone wants to complain about a culture of violence in South Africa, perhaps they would benefit from a slightly longer memory. A culture of violence was precisely the foundation of the Apartheid regime’s power, which ruled from 1948 to 1994. That government, racist as a policy, brutalized its citizens at home, assassinated its opponents abroad, and waged wars that killed millions in Namibia, Angola, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. By the 1970s, South Africa even held nuclear weapons ready to vaporize any army that stood against them.

The culture of violence had no more dedicated a defender than Eugene Terre’Blanche. The Apartheid state was cruel in defence of white power, but not militant enough for Terre’Blanche. In 1973, in an attempt to drag his country further to the right, he set up the AWB, an armed, disciplined organization with a modified swastika for a logo. His comrades called him Die Leier, the Afrikaans word for Führer.

The major activity of the AWB was committing violence against non-whites. In 1993, when the Apartheid government was finally discussing a transition to democracy, the AWB attacked the venue hosting the negotiations and disrupted them by force. In 1994, the AWB tried to sabotage the nation’s first free elections with a bombing campaign. They failed to achieve their goal, but succeeded in killing twenty-one innocent civilians. Terre’Blanche later publicly accepted responsibility for the attacks and was rewarded with amnesty by the new South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation commission in 1998.

The end of Apartheid left Terre’Blanche free to farm his land, but did nothing to diminish his love of hurting others. In 1996 he beat and shot a black security guard in the head, leaving the man permanently disabled. He served three years for this crime, his first and only prison term.

Terre’Blanche met his end after a wage dispute. Two workers, aged 28 and 15, reportedly confronted him to demand months of withheld pay. According to the Associated Press, Terre’Blanche refused and threatened to kill the two. The young men struck first, and left Terre’Blanche’s corpse beaten and hacked until it was unrecognizable. The alleged killers then turned themselves in to the police.

The same publications that find such importance in the Malema connection take great pains to paint Terre’Blanche as a buffoon, a farcical figure. His obituary in the Financial Times mentions an episode where he fell off his horse at a rally, gossips about an alleged extramarital affair, but somehow omits any mention of a role in the 1994 bombings. There is much absurdity and little humor in the story of a man who aspired to be South Africa’s Hitler.

The Guardian called Terre’Blanche “a relic of a bygone age.” If only it were so. Sixteen years after the end of Apartheid, there has been no significant progress on the issue of land reform. The vast majority of South Africa’s best land is still owned by men like Terre’Blanche, who live well at the expense of their underpaid workers. Fighting this injustice will only become more popular in the years to come.

A day after promising revenge, the AWB’s leadership retracted the statement. They are a non-violent political party, they say. Perhaps they realized that promoting ideas of retribution in the minds of Julius Malema and his many supporters will not make their lives any easier. Eugene Terre’Blanche reaped what he sowed. There is still time for South Africa’s landowners to avoid the consequences of the culture of violence they created. But not much.

Eugene Terre’Blanche: Loser

The Andean nation has had an unhappy recent history even by Latin American standards. A two decades long civil war between government forces and the Shining Path rebels left almost seventy thousand dead. The man who claims victory for the war, former President Alberto Fujimori, who served between 1990 and 2000, did not accomplish the feat with clean hands. He launched a “self-coup” in 1992, using the military to purge the national Congress and institutions hostile to him. Fujimori’s tenure was marked by corruption and state repression, and today he is serving a long prison sentence for his many human rights violations.

The post-Fujimori years have not been an era of national healing. In 2006, after a bitter election campaign, the former president Alan García narrowly defeated Ollanta Humala, a nationalist and ally of Hugo Chávez, to gain a second term in office. That García should have returned for another stay in the Casa de Pizarro seems to be almost a grand political joke, for as President from 1985-1990, his corrupt regime oversaw a massive increase in the national debt, poverty, and the devaluation of the currency by more than a million times. He too has been accused of gross abuses of human rights. In short, it was the uselessness of the García administration that created the conditions for the rise of Fujimori in the first place.

The García sequel is no better than the original. Last October, he accepted the resignation of his entire cabinet as a result of a corruption scandal. In June of this year, a government attempt to expropriate indigenous land in the Amazon for the purposes of oil exploration led to clashes that left more than fifty soldiers and civilians dead. Yet another prime minister resigned in the aftermath. And little has been done to end the malnutrition that strikes one in five Peruvian children.

As can be imagined, Alan García has the approval rating to match his dismal performance. In fact, the October poll conducted by Ipsos APOYO Opinión y Mercado for the leading daily El Comercio shows only 26% of Peruvians support the president. The firm, which laudably makes a great deal of information on the results available, openly admits that the survey was conducted only in urban areas. This of course means that the more than a quarter of the population that lives in rural areas must naturally be unrepresented in the poll.

In the 2006 election, García drew his decisive support from the Lima metropolitan area, gaining almost two-thirds of the vote there. He was heavily beaten in rural Peru, in some places losing to Humala by fifty or sixty points. This month, the poll for El Comercio shows that his approval in the capital has plummeted to just 34%. When we consider that the parts of the country that rejected him most resoundingly three years ago are precisely those left out of the poll, it would appear that to credit Garcia with 26% approval would in fact be significantly overstating his popularity. He is fortunate that the constitution spares him the humiliation of running in the next election.

Waiting in the wings is Ollanta Humala, who is looking forward to another try for the presidency in 2011. The former army officer, who came to national prominence after leading a military uprising against the Fujimori regime in 2000, has won the support of the indigenous poor with his Inca nationalism and plain talk (he recently called García and Fujimori “bastards” at a public meeting). With an increase in his percentage of the vote of only 3%, he will be Peru’s next president. But his radicalism terrifies Peru’s elite, which fears being drawn into the Bolivarian axis led by Venezuela.  And from the right the leading candidate is Keiko Fujimori, daughter of Alberto and former first lady, who campaigns on a platform of amnesty for her father and draws support from those who crave the firm leadership he offered.

When just last year only one in four Americans approved of George W. Bush, no one suggested that he might be toppled before his term expired. The U.S.’ strong traditions, institutions, and civil society prevented a collapse into ungovernability. In Peru, none of these things exist, and if Alan García’s administration survives until 2011, it will most likely because it is “the government that divides us least,” as another statesman said long ago. By 2011, at the latest, the presidency will be up for grabs, and Peru must find a new governing majority. This will not be an easy process.

The bloodthirsty pollster offered traditional responses to his (or her) question – yes, no, maybe, and also the deranged “if he cuts my health care.” More than seven hundred answers (90% no) were received before the panicked application developer deleted the poll. The Secret Service investigated.

Friedman, reminded of the political climate in Israel shortly before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in in 1995, sets out a line that must not be crossed, “between criticizing the president and tacitly encouraging the unthinkable and the unforgivable.” Every decent person must agree with him – creating a climate of support for assassinations is surely unacceptable political discourse.

Unfortunately, a more honest political commentator would be forced to agree that “tacitly encouraging the unthinkable and the unforgivable” is official U.S. policy – as long as the target is some other country’s head of state. If just asking a question can encourage an action, then by that standard the U.S. government would be complicit in deaths of leaders as diverse as Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan, and Salvador Allende of Chile. Who can deny that the U.S. has sponsored attempts on the life of the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, or that it approved the execution of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein?

For many people, these policy decisions are proper and correct. On The 700 Club Pat Robertson, man of God, called for the murder of Hugo Chávez, and as recently as 2006 U.S. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen advocated the assassination of Fidel Castro. The killing of foreign leaders labeled hostile to the national interest is an acceptable idea in the United States. So how can we be surprised when those who view President Obama as an enemy apply the same logic?

Enough history. Let us return to the question that prompted the article – “Should Obama be Assassinated?” As repugnant as it may be, where exactly is the harm in casting this question into the murky depths of the Internet? To begin with we can assume that some Americans absolutely agree with the proposition, just as the recent German election tells us that at least 1.5% of that country’s electorate are unreconstructed Nazis. The poll in question is insight into the psyche of the asker – no one is dumb enough to suggest that the poll is somehow representative of U.S. or global public opinion. Confronted with the lunatic fringe, we have three choices. The first two, morally and practically impossible, are ignoring them or eliminating them. We have no choice but to defeat them in the battle of ideas.

When Aaron Gibralter and I created the Urtak project, we did so because we believed that widespread participation in public opinion research is necessary if it is actually to reveal what people think and care about. People are invited to add their questions to already existing surveys or to create their own – giving a much broader range of insights onto a sample than ever before possible. In the first survey created with our technology someone asked a question that is on a lot of minds “Will Obama be assassinated?” Of the more than two hundred who have answered this question, 35% say yes. More information about the sample is available at urtak.com, but suffice to say that the prospect of violence against Obama is worrying a diverse group.

President Obama is in danger. The arrests of two different groups of racist plotters were reported in August and October of last year. According to one book, death threats against Obama are five times more numerous than they were against George W. Bush. And this before this summer’s explosion of hatred, Obama as the new Hitler, and a national ammunition shortage. We cannot pretend that armed and organized intolerance does not exist.

Friedman is pursuing the strategy of the ostrich – burying his head in the sand and hoping the danger goes away. While he admits that crazed attacks on Obama from the right are now being repeated in Congress and by the well-known bigot Lou Dobbs of CNN, he does not suggest any course of action. From his high position, the bully reserves his venom for a powerless child (since cleared by the Secret Service) on Facebook – “I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin,” he says.

Friedman laments that there is no longer a “we” in American politics. Even if there ever was a “we” in American politics, creating a new consensus cannot be done without crushing the political power of those who believe in an exclusionary white Christian America. The question for us: what do we do next?

Fortunately for Uribe, the Colombian media still support him the best way they can, by commissioning low quality polls on his popularity. Last month I wrote about the serious problems with polls by Invamer Gallup, but they are just one of many offenders. For example, a poll from March of this year by Datexco, another Colombian research firm drew conclusions about the nation based on a sample of just 350 people! And no pollster cares to find a way around the problem that they are uniformly excluding rural Colombians, as well as the 15% of city dwellers that Gallup admits do not own phones.

The Colombian people have been subjected to a media bombardment of flawed poll results about Uribe. Since 2008 polls attempting to determine support for a potential third term have been coming out at the rate of at least one every two months. This is particularly interesting because a second reelection for Uribe until last week was a hypothetical question. If we cast our minds back to 2008 or 2000 we will remember that even in the U.S., the birthplace of polling, the public did not constantly see polls asking them about whether they wanted a third Bush or Clinton term. Is there really such a public clamor for Uribe to stay, or is this more similar to the strong media support that helped Mike Bloomberg force through an amendment to New York City’s term limits law last year?

A September 10 article in El Tiempo, Colombia’s largest daily and a strong supporter of the Uribista line helps to shed some light. The headline states that according to Invamer Gallup, 64% of Colombians support another Uribe term, and 58% would vote in an eventual referendum. This raises the question: why would there be a difference of 6% between the percentage of the population that supports another term and those that would actually show up to vote? The reason is because the headline misinforms. According to the data gathered by this survey, 86% of those who would vote in a referendum would vote to allow a third term. This means that at best, only 50% of those surveyed would actually vote for Uribe in a referendum, far lower than the trumpeted 64%.

The article also quotes Jorge Londoño, the president of Invamer Gallup, affirming that in two months, Uribe’s approval rating has risen by 3% and his favorability has risen by 2%. Last week, I pointed out that results that fall within a poll’s margin of error are statistically insignificant. Due to ignorance of survey methods, it is a common media practice to note tiny changes in poll results as representing either a rise or fall in support for a given position. But Londoño, the president of Colombia’s prestige polling firm has no such excuse. He knows exactly what he is doing: misleading the Colombian people.

Álvaro Uribe has refused to give a straight answer as to whether he wants to run for the presidency in 2010. He has repeatedly stated that it would be “inconvenient to perpetuate the presidency. “He could have easily vetoed last week’s referendum bill, and ended all discussion, but he has chosen not to. Yesterday, El Tiempo reported that a private meeting took place between Uribe and four Uribista pre-candidates for 2010, three of who have already said they would step aside if he chose to run. He again refused to explicitly state his plans, but over the course of the three hour discussion he told them to be ready to defend the banners of his government.

The pious Uribe feels he has a moral obligation to defend his country from threats internal (FARC) and external (Venezuela, Ecuador). Where does he get the strength? El Tiempo has the answer: he feels “empowered by the high public support reflected in the polls.” If the Constitutional Court allows the reelection referendum to take place, it is quite possible that Colombia will experience four more years of Uribe’s firm hand. When Colombians look for someone to thank for their good fortune, they should not forget their friends at Invamer Gallup and Datexco.

First, these results are based on the responses of only five hundred people. The laws of probability dictate that whether you are surveying a small population or a large one, the sample size of the poll will be the main influence on its margin of error. Just because Israel’s population is much smaller than the U.S.’s does not mean that a sample of five hundred will be as accurate as the more common samples of one thousand respondents.

In the case of the two Smith Research polls, the margin of error is 4.5%. What this means is that the August poll is just as likely to have returned a result at any point in a 9% range as it was to have a result of 4% believing Obama to be pro-Israel. It was just as likely to have found that 1%, or 6%, or 0%, or 8% shared this view. The June result of 6% is well within the poll’s margin of error. This means that there is no statistical difference at all between the two polls, yet in the first sentence of the Post piece we read that “The number of Israelis who see US President Barack Obama’s policies as pro-Israel has fallen to four percent.” This is either an embarrassing lack of understanding of how polls work, or an attempt to manipulate the public.

These problems pale in comparison to a much larger flaw: the intentional creation of an unrepresentative poll. While the headline of the article “4% of Israeli Jews: Obama pro-Israel” notes that only the opinions of the Jewish citizens of the State of Israel were considered, its first sentence does not. Arab Israelis, who make up 20% of the population, have been erased. While their views are very likely to be different from those of their Jewish compatriots, it is mind boggling to pretend they do not exist. Imagine a U.S. poll which ignored African-Americans, because they vote Democratic, or a Canadian poll that didn’t survey French Canadians, because they are separatists. In the North American political culture, these would be correctly identified as racist ideas. That Arab Israelis can be so blithely left out of a mainstream survey is deeply troubling.

Even if we accept the results of the Post poll, we still have to wonder why Jewish Israelis have such a low opinion of Barack Obama’s policies. Obama has been a strong friend of Israel. He denounced Hamas and Hezbollah. He supported Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon, and last winter’s attack on Gaza. He has repeatedly insisted that Israel, which he calls “our strongest ally in the region,” must remain a Jewish state. His Israel policy differs from his predecessor’s only in that he has argued for a freeze on construction of new settlements in the West Bank. If Obama is demoralized about his tough summer at home, remembering that Israel has no electoral votes could do something to console him.