The majority of Britons agree with racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims, and 69 percent think the UK should take in fewer refugees from Syria and Iraq, an Arab News/YouGov poll has found.
The wide-ranging poll of 2,142 adults found that UK residents have strong feelings about key Middle East issues — including the fight against Daesh and war in Iraq — but 81 percent admitted to knowing little or nothing about the Arab world.
The results of the “UK attitudes toward the Arab world” survey are published today in Arab News and are being unveiled at a media event held in London.
One of the main findings of the poll, which was conducted in conjunction with the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU), was that 55 percent of Brits agree with racial profiling against Arabs and Muslims for security reasons.
The “UK attitudes toward the Arab world” poll, which was conducted in mid-August, illustrates a disparity in UK public opinion on the Arab world.
Seven in 10 believe the UK should take in fewer refugees from Syria and Iraq, rising to 91 percent among those who voted for the UK to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. More than six in 10 of the respondents feel that Arabs who migrated to the UK and Europe have failed to integrate in Western societies. [Arab News] Read more
Westerners: Guilty of Reading the News
In August, the polling company YouGov conducted an opinion survey among 2,000 members of the British public. The poll, carried out in partnership with Arab News, the Saudi paper owned by a member of the Saudi royal family, was published September 25.
As might be expected from such a publication, the questions asked of the British public, and the answers received, suited a particular line of argument: the survey evidently sought to find evidence of “Islamophobic” attitudes.
It duly found that 41% of the British public polled said that Arab immigrants and refugees had not added anything to society and 55% agreed in principle with the profiling of Arabs for security reasons. The Arab News/YouGov poll also found that 72% of the British public think that “Islamophobia” is getting worse in the UK.
Alongside this report came the surprising finding that a similar number of British people (7 in 10) believe that “the rise in Islamophobic comments by politicians and others are fuelling hate crime.” [Gatestone Institute] Read more
Islam Surveyed 