--- Geoff Burling <llywrch(a)agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
That may be the point you want to make, Steve, but
it was not
the reason I asked the original poster to include
the definitions
that the Israeli equivalent of a Census Bureau uses
to define
"Jew", "Arab", "Christian", & other catagories.
Ethnicity (if I may use the term to apply to the
process of
subdividing populations) is a messy business.
This is valid. And I was simply localizing the
complexities of this ethnic debate to the area. Albeit
summat simplistically, Ill admit.
I'm not making
a snide reference to Neo-Nazis who hide the fact
that they have
ancestors who were Jews or African-Americans; any
time one
attempts to make a formal catagorization of
subgroups in a
population, one will find exceptions. For example,
there is a
group in Oklahoma known as "Black Cherokees", who
are the
decendants of slaves owned by Cherokee Indians
before the American
Civil War: they consider themselves Cherokees;
Cherokees whose
ancestors were in America before 1492 consider them
African-Americans.
The point of all this specificity is that its
nitpicking -- it overruns secular (meaning
'disregarding religion') humanism (meaning 'of human
causes') and other fads like "democracy" to
reinterpret conflicts from an strictly ethnic POV, and
not a human one.
I'll use myself as another example. My
great-grandmother is said
to have been part American Indian. That part of my
family were
New England whalers, & every time I look at her
photograph, I have
to wonder if she had lied to her husband & children
& she was
actually Polynesian.
Do you? What a burden. Indeed you should go with the
fact that we all come from roughly 5-10K people (in
Africa) back to a population bottleneck 75K years ago.
The rest is details.
However my full name makes it
appear that
I am as much of a WASP as anyone in the Bush family.
(Even though
I prefer the term "Anglo-American", since my
father's ancestors
were dirt farmers from the East Midlands.)
What I want in the article is an explanation how the
Israeli
government determines these groups, & how people
fall into them.
This is valid. If statistics are used for this purpose
--fine. This thread is concerned with the use of a bot
to mass-import (possibly) POV statistics en masse to
the WP.
Do they self-report? Are they labelled at the time
of birth or
nationalization? And what groups exist that an
Israeli
citizen could be catagorized under?
This is all valid again. Agian nothing to do with the
bot, and the source for its stats.
I read the rest, wont comment for length.
~S~
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