Poll: Only one in three Finns sees terrorism as threat to Finland

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Thirty-two per cent of Finns see terrorism as a threat to their home country, claims the Voice of the People global survey by Gallup International. The percentage is among the lowest in the world.
      The survey covered 64 countries. Only in three of them - Austria, Iceland and Albania - is the portion of the respondents who consider terrorism a threat smaller than in Finland.
     
"In general, the Finns feel relatively safe, whether it is a question of an external threat or their physical or social security. Other studies also confirm this", says Sakari Nurmela from Suomen Gallup, the company responsible for compiling the Finnish data.
      Three-quarters of all the respondents to the study consider terrorism a threat to their country.
     
The threat of terrorism is rated highest in countries where terror attacks have taken place in recent years.
      The list is topped by Colombia and India, where 97 per cent of the respondents consider terrorism a threat. Colombia has been plagued by the atrocities carried out by the domestic FARC guerrilla movement and drug barons, while in Mumbai, India, bomb attacks against trains killed nearly 200 people last summer. India has accused Pakistan of the attack, but so far no perpetrators have been established.
      Next on the list of countries where terrorism is considered a grave threat come the United States and Israel, followed by Peru, Great Britain, Indonesia, and Russia.
     
The rest of the world is divided in opinions when it comes to the role of the United States in the fight against terrorism. In Israel 82 per cent of the respondents consider the contribution of the United States to be positive. In Denmark, which also took part in the war in Iraq, the corresponding figure is 58.
      On average, nations in Western Europe see the role of the United States as negative rather than positive. Finland belongs to this group. According to the poll, with regard to world peace or ridding the world of poverty, 66 per cent of Finns see the contribution of the USA as a negative one. The demarcation line between the Muslim and Christian world is particularly striking: some 62 per cent of Muslim respondents saw the US role in the fight against terror as negative, while among Christians the figure was between 28 and 34 per cent.
     
In most categories of the survey Gallup International showed interest in how the respondents would view the global role of the United States. Only with regard to the global economic growth do a significantly larger percentage (46 per cent) of the respondents feel the input of the United States is positive rather than negative (27 per cent). Views on the U.S. role in environmental protection were pretty uniformly negative. Only three per cent of Finns took a positive view, with 74 per cent showing condemnation. Even in the United States itself, 39 per cent felt the country was doing more harm than good. This was six per cent more than believed the U.S. role in global environmental protection was positive. India in particular, along with Russia, stood out in this regard - respondents in both countries considered that the United States' role was a positive one.
      The Voice of the People 2006 is a regular Gallup International global survey, conducted across 64 countries in which in excess of 58,000 people were interviewed between July and September 2006. The survey represents the views of more than 1.5 billion global citizens.
      In Finland 1,249 people were interviewed.


Links:
  Gallup International
  Voice of the People

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