Poll: 93% of Israelis worry about terror

Residents of 63 nations asked about terror threat, US role in war on terror.

By JPOST.COM STAFF
tel aviv bombing 2 (photo credit: Zaka (Nati Shapira))
tel aviv bombing 2
(photo credit: Zaka (Nati Shapira))
Ninety-three percent of Israelis see terrorism as a major problem, a recent poll analyzing worldwide concern over terror revealed. Gallup International asked over 60,000 people in 63 countries how worried they were by the threat of terrorism and how they perceived the United States' role in the war on global terror, Army Radio reported on Tuesday. With 93% of its citizens concerned about terrorism, Israel ranked third in the world, coming in behind Colombia and India, where 97% of respondents said that they were worried about terror. Also in the ten countries most concerned by terrorism were the United States, the United Kingdom, Peru, Indonesia, Turkey, Russia and Spain, where over 80% of those asked said they worried about terror. Among the nations least concerned about terrorism was Albania, where only 20% considered terror a threat. When asked how they perceived the United States' role in the war on terror, 44% of respondents worldwide said that the US was making a positive contribution to fighting terror, while 33% said that the US's policy on terror was having a negative effect. In April, the US State Department's annual report on worldwide terrorism singled out Iran as the most active state sponsor of terrorism, saying that its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Ministry of Intelligence and Security have been directly involved in the planning and support of terrorist attacks. The report tallied some 11,000 terror attacks around the world last year, resulting in more than 14,600 deaths. That figure signified almost a fourfold increase in attacks from 2004, though the agency attributed the change largely to new ways of tallying the incidents. At least 10,000 to 15,000 of the approximately 40,000 people killed or wounded worldwide were Muslims, most of them in Iraq, said the National Counterterrorism Center, which provided the data to the State Department. Approximately 3,500 of last year's attacks occurred in Iraq, and about 8,300 of the deaths occurred there, as well, accounting for a large part of the increase over 2004. AP contributed to this report.