Steve Vertigum wrote:
--- Stan Shebs <shebs(a)apple.com> wrote:
Oh geez... If you have some proof, let's see
it.
Otherwise you're
just spreading FUD.
Proof of what?
You asserted that official statistics of an "apartheid state"
are "smelly". To me that means you're suggesting that the
numbers have been fabricated or falsified in some way.
Almost every
official statistic
in Wikipedia
has a political opponent or conspiracy theorist
ready to challenge
its validity;
Can you "prove" this?
It would be a pretty long list, but one can "sample"; for
instance, the statistics on US Jews and Muslims are being
fought over, because by some measures the Muslim population
of the US just passed the Jewish population. Some Jewish
groups have been casting doubt on the numbers, ditto for
some Muslim groups (don't remember the names, but easy
enough to look up). Even in small towns in the US, not
hard to turn up the crank in the city council meetings who
is upset that the town is being "taken over" by racial group
X, and claiming that the statistics have been falsified.
There is/was a political fight over sampling by the US Census,
where homeless/minority/immigrant groups have claimed that
various schemes will systematically undercount their respective
constituencies, thus casting doubts on all of the Census'
results.
As with any other kind of scholarly activity, we need to
maintain at least a little skeptical wariness, both of
numbers purporting to be authoritative, as well as the
persons questioning then.
In the case of Israel, there are plenty
of reasons to
challenge any UN numbers - and plenty of books doing
just that, in
great detail - so it's not neutral to simply declare
that UN
numbers must be better than Israeli numbers.
What reasons are those?
UN organizations often include individuals and states with explicit
anti-Israel biases. Not surprising, since there are 22-odd Arab states
only a few of which have normalized relations with Israel, with the
rest declaring "Barbie dolls are Jewish" and so forth. So before
placing much credence in a UN statistic, I'll want to know more
about the specific organization that published it, whether it's
non-partisan, or subject to influence by member states with their
own agendas.
Stan