Liberty student challenges Middle East stereotype

The stereotype, as Jessica Davidson always heard it, said that all people from the Middle East hate Americans.

But the Liberty University senior decided not to accept that at face value.

“I wanted to get first-hand responses on how they perceive America,” she said.

So Davidson spent her summer e-mailing back and forth with dozens of other English-speaking 20-somethings from the Middle East.

And now, she’s preparing to share her results with the United States government’s Defense Intelligence Agency.

Davidson started her project using the online social networking Web site, Facebook. She randomly selected about 20 Facebook members from each country in the Middle East, and e-mailed them to ask if they would participate anonymously.

She sent those who agreed a list of 27 questions that she and Liberty Government Professor Stephen Bowers had compiled.

Do you think America should have invaded Iraq?

How do you think Americans view Arabs or Muslims after September 11, 2001?

Have you been to America or considered moving there permanently?

“I got pretty good responses,” Davidson said. “I had a few radicals, but the majority of them were very nice.”

Most respondents said they disapproved of the September 11 attacks, she wrote in a report on her findings.

They also felt that since the attacks, Americans view people from the Middle East “as animals, rapists, terrorists, and people who eat children,” noted one respondent, a Shiite Muslim from Iran.

Most of the respondents had a negative view of the war in Iraq, Davidson said. Their responses varied when asked for feelings of Saddam Hussein’s removal from power.

“I was really shocked at how many people wanted to see a democracy in Iraq,” Davidson said. “They eventually want us (American forces) out, but they do want democracy in Iraq.”

And to answer her initial curiosity — all respondents, whether or not they favored the war in Iraq, said they do not hate Americans.

“I hate the American system, not the American people,” wrote a Sunni Muslim Palestinian who lives in Jordan.

Bowers knew the information would be of interest to defense agencies because he was hired to conduct a similar study shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But he had to know people in the Middle East for his study, while Davidson was able to do hers through the Internet.

“With technology as it is today, there are fewer secrets,” he said. “Through the Internet, you can access a lot of those areas. There’s a real market for that.”

Last month, he presented the survey’s findings at a Washington, D.C., conference sponsored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Davidson, who hopes to graduate in December, plans to expand her research to include people from Eastern Europe and South America.

George Buzzy, Dean of Liberty’s Helms School of Government, said Davidson used a technique growing in popularity called “open source intelligence.”

It refers to data that can be accessed by anyone around the world, such as information that people post online about themselves in social networking Web sites like Facebook.

“She kind of turned it on its head,” he said. “It’s amazing what people will tell you when you ask them.”