Arab attributions for the attack on America: The case of Lebanese subelites

There are at least two major ways of understanding the attributions that Arab young people used to explain the September 11 th attack on the World Trade Center: (a) in terms of a so-called clash of civilizations or an inherent conflict between Muslim and Western values or (b) in terms of an antidominance reaction to perceived American and Israeli oppression of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. The authors compare the relative validities of these two framings using a sample of Lebanese students from the American University of Beirut. The results from analysis of variance, regression, and structural equation modeling showed strong, clear, and consistent support for the antidominance attributions and essentially no support for the clash-of-civilizations attributions.