Iran is popular in Pakistan, overwhelmingly disliked everywhere else

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/01/11/iran-is-popular-in-pakistan-overwhelmingly-disliked-everywhere-else/

As promised, I’m continuing to mine the data from Pew’s fascinating global attitudes project, which has just released a big batch of new surveys. Among other things, the researchers asked respondents in 21 countries how they feel about Iran. The results are bad news for Tehran, which seems to be wildly unpopular. Here are its favorable ratings, with unfavorables farther down in the post:



The only country where Iran’s favorability rating scores above 50 percent is Pakistan, with 76 percent giving the rogue state a positive review. That’s a tad ironic given Pakistan’s treatment of its Shiite minority, a sect with which Iran is closely identified. Pakistani Shiites have been so repeatedly and brutally targeted by terrorist groups that the government’s failure to protect them “amounts to complicity,” according to Human Rights Watch. Perhaps Pakistanis, though, have some sympathy for a country with potential nuclear ambitions and a love of shooting down U.S. drones.

Otherwise, though, it’s a lonely world for Iran. Even in Lebanon, which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has visited to much fanfare, only 39 percent of respondents gave Iran a favorable rating. And that was the second-highest. Not exactly a sweeping national endorsement, and possibly one that divides along Lebanon’s sectarian lines. It doesn’t give you much faith in Iran’s supposed leadership of the Muslim world that they’re not even liked in most surveyed countries.