WASHINGTON — Public support for Osama bin Laden and terrorist violence has declined markedly in several Muslim countries, although it remains substantial, a new poll shows.
A Pew Global Attitudes Project survey found that confidence in Bin Laden "to do the right thing regarding world affairs" fell in four of six sampled countries over the last two years. Support for violence against civilian targets has fallen in five of the six countries since they were last polled by the Pew project.
Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said the results suggested that "people are tiring of terrorism in these places," perhaps because most of the countries have themselves suffered such attacks.
At the same time, the figures show that there remains "a pretty substantial body of support" for deadly attacks in defense of Islam, Kohut said.
The six Muslim-majority countries polled were Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey.
Kohut said the changing attitude toward Bin Laden may reflect a cooling of anger toward the United States since May 2003, when Pew last asked the question. At that time, memories of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq two months earlier were fresh, and many Muslims saw Bin Laden as a defender.
Support for Bin Laden fell in Indonesia, Lebanon, Morocco and Turkey, yet it rose in two countries that Washington considers key allies: Jordan and Pakistan. Sixty percent of respondents in Jordan and 51% in Pakistan say they have "a lot" or "some" confidence that the Al Qaeda leader will do the right thing, up from 55% and 45%, respectively.
As for violence against civilians, 13% of people surveyed in Morocco this spring thought it was justified "often" or "sometimes" to defend Islam from its enemies, down from 40% a year earlier. In Pakistan, the share who approved of violence "often" or "sometimes" fell from 33% in 2002 to 25% this year, and in Indonesia that figure fell from 27% in the summer of 2002 to 15% this year.
One exception to the trend was Jordan, which has a large population of Palestinians and long-standing sympathies with the minority Sunni Muslims in neighboring Iraq. In the summer of 2002, 43% said that violence against civilians to defend Islam was justified "sometimes" or "often"; by this spring, the figure had jumped to 57%.
