It is easy to draw intuitive statistical conclusions in a small town; you bet if there weren't usually race based violence in a small town, that if you saw 4-5 incidents in a short period of time, there would be very few non-racism based explanations that were plausible.
Israel is 7.5 million people with 75% Jews. That provides a large enough pool of incidents of Jews attacking Muslims to draw from just because there are a given number of violent people in any country. Now they can easily misrepresent these stories because you can cram an article with them. You can't do intuitive statistics with a country of 7.5 million, or even 500,000. You need to do statistics, period. Anything less is irresponsible, and any article from any organization that tries to interpret anecdotes into patterns when you're drawing from such large sample pools is not practicing professional journalism. And with Al Jazeera's "In Depth" page basically dedicating it's Israeli/Palestinian focus on these types of articles, there is little room to interpret there ME coverage as objective.
> If it happens in Israel all of the sudden there is a lot of defense and touchiness about the issue. Why is that? Why is it so hard to believe that a country in the Middle East would have a problem with racism.
Because there's never any evidence except these anecdote based articles. At a certain point, if you want to make such a serious accusation that deviates from the assumptions that people operate on, the burden is on you to prove it, with some sort of comprehensive proof.
you must be very unhappy with this "journalism" thing then. Have you ever seen that journalists would do statistics on anecdotes? Most of them have trouble researching and pointing to similar accidents that happened in the past.
I don't think anybody would base any serious policy on an article in the news. So there is not much reason to perform real science on it. When you're putting together anecdotes of racial attacks in Israel and you have to give it a title ...
I think there is a double standard that is being applied and it is rationalized and back-propagated from a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived criticism of Israel.
All of the sudden statistical significance and probability distribution come in to play. I doubt it if New York times wrote an article about 3 or 4 racially motivated attacks in New York and wondered if there is resurgence in racism, if everyone would accuse it for "intolerance" for not presenting a statistical derivation of its conclusion.
I don't know why discussing racism in a Middle East country is has to be such a touchy subject but it is.
>> I think there is a double standard that is being applied and it is rationalized and back-propagated from a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived criticism of Israel.
>> All of the sudden statistical significance and probability distribution come in to play.
You've got it completely backwards of course. Asking for statistical proof of racism should be the standard, and the criticism should be of those who don't have that proof, not of those who deviate and begin asking for it. It's pretty alarming and telling that those arguing that Israel is racist are blatantly complaining that too much proof is being asked of their accusations of racism. Any decent humanitarian should not want the accusation of racism to be thrown around so easily by the media, otherwise its potency as an accusation is diluted. As it has been by exactly the type articles like on Al Jazeera, and as evidenced by the number of people even in this thread who so casually accuse a country of racism by nothing more than HN posts and Wikipedia articles.
I think we are both making different default assumptions. My default assumptions seem to be that there is rampant racism in the Middle East stemming for thousands of years of complicated history. You default assumption is that there is no racism in Israel. I don't mind if articles pointing out the racism do not have rigorous statistical studies, but you do, because your default assumption are that there is no racism.
Right, you want it to be easy to just assume that an entire country has rampant racism because of some general perception of the middle east whereas I'm asking for evidence that any belief regarding racism in Israel is true. I don't have to prove there isn't racism in Israel to say "don't jump to hasty conclusions about a country being racist that can dilute accusation of racism and cause prejudice in itself."
Israel is 7.5 million people with 75% Jews. That provides a large enough pool of incidents of Jews attacking Muslims to draw from just because there are a given number of violent people in any country. Now they can easily misrepresent these stories because you can cram an article with them. You can't do intuitive statistics with a country of 7.5 million, or even 500,000. You need to do statistics, period. Anything less is irresponsible, and any article from any organization that tries to interpret anecdotes into patterns when you're drawing from such large sample pools is not practicing professional journalism. And with Al Jazeera's "In Depth" page basically dedicating it's Israeli/Palestinian focus on these types of articles, there is little room to interpret there ME coverage as objective.
> If it happens in Israel all of the sudden there is a lot of defense and touchiness about the issue. Why is that? Why is it so hard to believe that a country in the Middle East would have a problem with racism.
Because there's never any evidence except these anecdote based articles. At a certain point, if you want to make such a serious accusation that deviates from the assumptions that people operate on, the burden is on you to prove it, with some sort of comprehensive proof.