Dumb polling

Some of the polling that goes on among Middle Eastern is just laughable.  Look at this silly poll by the International Republican Institute.  So many questions revolve around religion versus secularism when the terms carry such different meanings in Arabic.  And notice when they asked them for "national" news channel, they included France 24 but not Arabic news channel.  I have talked to director of polling at Gallup, and there are so many problems associated.  In Egypt, Gallup used to do face-to-face interviews and the Gallup team would be accompanied by Mubarak goons/propagandists who kindly served as translators.  And some of the words that are used in polling are not even translatable.  Even academics fall into some of those problems: look up the massive study by University of Michigan's Ronald Ingelhart, titled Human Values.  According to one survey in that book, people in Turkey really dislike to be neighbors with...Muslims.