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Joe Scarborough: 'They' hate us

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough kicked off this morning's episode of Morning Joe with a rant that lumped the entirety of the Muslim and Arab world together in a unified hatred for the United States.

"You know why they hate us?," Scarborough asked. "I talked to intelligence people all weekend. They hate us because of their religion, they hate us because of their culture, and they hate us because of peer pressure. You talk to any intelligence person, they will tell you that's the same thing. And all those people who think we're going to go over there and change them are just naive. Think about the savagery -- the sheer unrestrained savagery -- that we have seen across the Middle East and the Arab world because of a crude film. They know what they're doing."

Lest you thought the "they" to which referred was a small group within the world's Arab and Muslim population, Scarborough clarified: "One intelligence person told me, if you scratch the surface, and if you gave every street vendor to prime minister in that region a chance to throw a rock at the U.S. embassy, they would," he said. "So this [film] is their excuse."

*It should be noted that Scarborough has been a frequent critic of conservatives who have made controversial remarks about Islam. Minutes after his comments, Scaborough lashed out hard at some hard-line conservatives for their defense of the filmmaker who sparked protests overseas: “You have people now that seem to be rallying in defense of this filmmaker … a lot of people on the fringes of the conservative movement," he said, criticizing those who have labeled Los Angeles police officers "brownshirts" for taking the filmmaker into custody.

But as NBC's Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell told Scarborough, sentiment toward the United States "is different from country to country."

In Libya, where U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed, a majority of citizens (54 percent) approve of the United States' leadership, according to Gallup. That's up from 30-percent approval ratings in 2010 and 2011, and just one point below our current approval rating in Israel. 2011 approval ratings elsewhere range from 9 percent (Iran) to 37 percent (Algeria) -- not a majority, but certainly far from "every street vendor to prime minister in that region" (though what he means by "that region" is unclear.)

Meanwhile, in this country, Arabs and Muslims have the lowest favorable ratings (41 and 40 percent, respectively) when compared against all other religious groups, according to an August survey from the Arab American Institute.

NOTE: This post has been updated to include more context; editorial commentary has been removed. Updates appear in the body of the text, and are signified by asterisks.