Talk:Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies

The article is too politically focused, and neglects still the academic side of the work of the ACRPS

Some sections of the article should be moved to the Wikipedia article on Mr. Azmi Bishara. Truly controversial, as he is in political terms - at least seen from a "Western viewpoint", - debates about these issues should be mentioned there, and not in the article on the Think-Tank ACRPS. After all, as the Arab Opinion Index shows, the ACRPS provided global scholarship with good and reliable data, regardless of what position you have in the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Think tanks are there to analyze the world, and not to build or not to build political fronts. Good think tanks write the kind of stuff, which the "other side" also just cannot miss to read. As any person with a good access to international press archives will see, respected international western mainstream media debate again and again works produced by the ACRPS, and by mixing politics with academics, the current Wikipedia article on the ACRPS should rather concentrate in future on the academic and media echo of this interesting think tank. In the "good old days" of the Cold War, US experts read what the IMEMO Institute in Moscow was writing, and Russian experts never missed to read papers from Rand Corporation etc. This should be an example John de Norrona (talk) 19:46, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Arab Opinion Index and the Gloria Center article by Arno Tausch, whose mentioning was deleted by user Abedwayyad

Regarding the debate of the article http://www.gloria-center.org/author/arno-tausch/ in the article on the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies: Let's assume for reasons of calm and politiness that the deletion of mentioning of the Tausch article in the present Wikipedia article is not vandalism, but political passion by a Wikipedia user. Political passion is always a bad companion for a thoughtful analysis. There is no such thing as a "Herzliya" Institute, but only a "Gloria Center", and the allegation that this is a "Israeli military think tank" is not substantiated in any form; and at any rate: so what? I suspect that your knowedge of the center is still limited, judging by the erroneous mentioning of their very name in the first place. Good global think tanks, like the Rand Corporation, the Hudson Institute, the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, the IMEMO Institute in Moscow, the Instituto Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Brazil (my favorite one) or - for that matter - the ACRPS - all have relationships with governments, and many of them with the security agencies of these governments, and I hasten to add, the world would be much more peaceful and better, if only the political classes were to listen more to their expertise. Passionate follower as you are of what you term the "Palestinian cause" you should start to read, for example the Wikipedia article on Martin van Creveld, and you will realize how useful and good the analyses of researchers from think tanks can be, even in the passionate atmosphere of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. As I said in a comment to you, Mr. Abedwayyad, before: the region can learn a lot from the rational governance East and West acquired during the time of the Cold War, and the regular reading of the materials, produced by the think tanks of the other side, was part and parcel of that governance. As far as the entry on Tausch in the ACRPS is concerned, it was you who began the Tausch debate in the first place; since you now deleted the mentioning of the Tausch article altogether, I say: better no entry on that subject than a wrong entry. Of course, any 100 class of social survey research will teach you that if you have a survey of the usage of red shirts on Mondays, and two countries - one with 90 million inhabitants (country A), the other with 10 million inhabitants (country B), and in country A 50% are wearing a red shirt on Monday, while in country B only 10% are wearing a red shirt on Monday, it would be wrong to assume that in both countries 30% (the simple average of the two survey results) of the people wear a red shirt on Mondays, since in country A 45 million wear a red shirt on Monday, and in country B 1 million wear a red shirt on Monday, which makes 46 million people in both countries, i.e. 46%. The ACRPS however exactly provides only averages of the survey results, WITHOUT population weighting: The March 2012 of the Arab Opinion Index edition says on page 7 in reference to Figure 1 on page 8 quite clearly enough that 73% of the citizens of the Arab countries are satisfied or very satisfied with their lives. What Tausch did in his article is only to provide the population weighted results, and also to develop UNDP type indices from the ACRPS results. Where Tausch agreed in the interpretation with the ACRPS was that the desire for democracy in the region is enormous, but where he disagrees is that (given the weight of the Egyptian results) mass support for secular, democratic civil societies is weaker than suggested by the ACPRS, when you once introduce population weights. This certainly is a valid point, and several ACRPS research papers argue anyway along these lines. So why engage in an edit war? John de Norrona (talk) 09:19, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

The deleted Jerusalem Post Quotation

This is absolutely unfair and politically biased. The article gave a positive appreciation of the work of the ACRPS by . I herewith complain to the Wikipedia authorities.John de Norrona (talk) 18:20, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Correction: On a point of fact, Haaretz is "Israel's most authoritative newspaper"