Steve Vertigum wrote:
--- Stan Shebs shebs@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