Obama less favorably viewed among Muslims: Survey

Washington, Jun 18 (ANI): US President Barack Obama's ratings among Muslims has gone down this year as per a Pew Global Attitudes survey.

Obama continues to be popular and to lift America's image in much of the world, with the notable exception of Muslim countries where the US President is less favorably viewed than he was a year ago, The Christian Science Monitor reports.

That is a key finding of the Pew Global Attitudes survey that has chronicled the fall and rise of America's image abroad in the years since 9/11 and, more recently, the advent of Obama's presidency.

A year after Obama's groundbreaking Cairo speech, in which he spoke to the world's Muslim communities, the new survey finds a falloff in the numbers for America in Muslim countries.

Major factors in the soured opinions, analysts say, are disappointment in the perceived lack of follow-through on Obama's call at Cairo for better Western-Muslim relations and lingering disagreement with the US military's intervention in Muslim countries.

"The lack of support [for the United States] in the Muslim world is coincident with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Andrew Kohut, president of Washington's Pew Research Center, which conducts the annual survey.

He spoke Thursday morning at a Monitor breakfast, where the survey was previewed, the CSM reports.

There's also "disappointment" among Muslims about the US under Obama, Kohut says. Many have a perception, for example, that the US still "does not deal fairly" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Still, the survey of 22 countries finds that Obama is more popular abroad than at home - and that the president's popularity continues to boost America's global image. (ANI)