http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=15904997&postcount=839
I know, analyzing data points is hard! Let’s just not do it.
Maybe you can get a mod injunction for that, too.
Well I too am fed up with attempts to derail threads via requests for evidence that doesn’t even have to be Googled from reliable sources because it’s obvious that everyone with a clear-headed and objective style of thinking already knows it.
I’m guessing you’re implying that you’d be someone "with a clear-headed and objective style of thinking " so what’s your take on the poll that found “58% believe Israel already practises apartheid against Palestinians”?
Give it a go…
I must be a very poor writer to make a person of your intelligence misunderstand me so completely.
On the contrary, I consider the apartheid question extremely useful in determining Israeli perceptions of their government’s policies. Like everyone who disagrees with you, the poll respondents were [del]possibly mistaken[/del] [del]clearly wrong[/del] willfully ignorant in their refusal to apply the strict legal definition as formulated by the 2002 Rome Statue of the ICC, but I evidently have a higher opinion than you of the intelligence of Israeli citizens, and I think the question and answers, though perhaps not suitable for prosecution in the ICC, cut through the legalese and got to the essence.
If you find the results too jarring to your world view, I suggest you drop whatever crucial work you are currently doing, go to Israel, and grab everyone you see by the scruff of the neck and read the 2002 Rome Statute of the ICC to them, and release them only after they can repeat it verbatim.
But although that might change the poll results if the same question is asked again, it won’t change the underlying problems.
It’s one thing to support Israel in its actions, and argue that they are necessary under the circumstances. It’s quite another to put your fingers in your ears and pretend that Israel can do no wrong, even if that means disagreeing with the majority of its own citizens.
This is not good faith debating.
Provide some sort of proof for your assertion that a technical term, used incorrectly by the wording of the poll itself was correctly understood by the respondents. Some sort of poll showing general fluency among various population groups with the relevant legal definitions would be fine, international norms for same would be even better. But I suspect you’re just making claims you have absolutely no way to verify because they sound good to you.
Cite or retract.
I couldn’t agree more.
You’re arguing on whether phlogiston has an influence on werevolves.
-
Gideon Levy is a Rush Limbaugh of the left. He’s an epitome of lachrymose sensationalist yellow journalism. I read Ha’aretz daily, and can’t get through his columns. In my view, he damages the Left here, but surely increases the circulation. The newspaper apologized in a later issue for the sensationalist, and wrong headline.
-
Whatever “apartheid” means, and I will refer to this later, it is known, even in Israel, by the large majority, that it is a bad thing. So, actually, I am encouraged to know that it is common knowledge here that we do bad things to Palestinians.
-
The separate road issue is a red herring. There have been in the past multiple attacks by Palestinians on cars driving nearby their villages, so the settlers demanded separate roads. They got some of them, thus separating Jewish and Palestinian traffic in some areas. There was a major outcry over the cost - many people said that if the settlers want to live in a dangerous are, it’s their problem.
Well, of course that is the correct way to look at it.
Another fellow claimed that the poll reported that the majority of Israelis think their government practices apartheid to some degree, and neither FinnAgain nor his tendentious sources have refuted that in the least. All he can do is claim that they don’t know what they are saying.
I guess he is so exercised about this because he is accustomed to the usual polls on political issues where all the respondents have degrees in economics and foreign policy, or polls on evolution where all the respondents have degrees in biology.
Thank you for so elegantly proving my point about general understanding of what “apartheid” means, by providing an object lesson of someone who has no idea. There is no “degrees of apartheid”. Jim Crow, however bad it was, was not apartheid. Discrimination is not apartheid.
You can’t have a “degree of apartheid” any more than you can be a bit pregnant or mildly dead.
Actually, it depends whose definition you use. You and your CAMERA pals prefer to cite a source that few people have heard of, and that nobody outside of the ICC has any use for. If you cite a source that most people would recognize, you get this:
Jim Crow would definitely qualify under definitions 2 and 3.
But we both know that all that is a red herring anyway. This was a poll, not a bar exam. It was not intended to report the ICC’s official legal opinion of Israeli policies. It was meant to report the perceptions, right or wrong, of the Israeli people, and it did that.
This is not a difficult concept. Nobody here is claiming that the poll proves that the Israeli government is practicing apartheid, by any definition. It just proves what people thought at the time they were polled.
But everyone but you understands that the poll does show that a majority of Israelis feel that Palestinians, in some quantity and to some degree, are being oppressed by the Israeli government. They may or may not be using some terms the way you would like, and they may or may not be correct in their understanding of the actual government policies and/or practices, but you haven’t offered the slightest bit of evidence that their responses to a simple question were not accurately reported.
Falsely claiming that I asserted things I never asserted won’t help you. Claiming that the Israeli man on the street has not fully absorbed the 2002 Rome Statute of the ICC won’t help you (and just incidentally, both the US and Israel have refused to submit to the authority of the ICC, so CAMERA struck out on that one). The only thing that will help you is to prove that the results of the poll were fudged, or that the sample of people polled was not representative. You are welcome to try either approach, but I solemnly assure you that repeating, ad nauseum, that Israelis don’t know the meaning of apartheid will not convince anyone of anything, except that you refuse to admit you’re wrong.
And you now have provided one so broad as to encompass a huge percent of all the nations on the entire planet. And, lo and behold, provided a second, contradictory definition to the One True Definition you’ve told us everybody knows. One will also note that the use and nature of the poll has changed, lo and behold, each time you’ve been proven wrong. One of those coincidences. I’m sure that now it’s not so critical that they understood international law all along, eh?
No, Tony. Basic reading comprehension. The question was about “in Israel”. Palestinians aren’t Israelis and aren’t Israelis. They were talking about discrimination in Israel.
Won’t happen – that’s the whole idea behind the counter-debate. Or, as some might rightly call it, obfuscatory tactics.
They are good and they are organized – if way too transparent by now.
I would propose to click trough the link in the Guardian article to look at the original Gideon Levy article.
You will see the following disclaimer preceding it:
CLARIFICATION: The original headline for this piece, ‘Most Israelis support an apartheid regime in Israel,’ did not accurately reflect the findings of the Dialog poll. The question to which most respondents answered in the negative did not relate to the current situation, but to a hypothetical situation in the future: ‘If Israel annexes territories in Judea and Samaria, should 2.5 million Palestinians be given the right to vote for the Knesset?’
But not only this. What percentage were against annexing the territories is no less important.
Any of you that really want to understand the survey should read the following:
http://storify.com/avimayer/haaretz-and-apartheid-the-full-picture
And this:
Just my opinion, but if you want people to know what the poll said, it would be a lot more helpful if you translated and posted the poll itself, instead of responses to Levy’s articles about it. The Mayer article has a few of the questions, but in Hebrew, and the Haaretz English website only gives the first paragraph of articles before demanding payment.
The point of all the articles cited so far seems to be that Levy mischaracterized either the questions or the answers. If so, then what we’ve learned is that we need to see the original questions and data, not more paraphrases of them.
And even in these articles, I still haven’t seen anything that contradicts the assertion that set all of this off, namely that a majority of respondents believed that Israel was already following policies they perceived as apartheid.
Or you could read this one:
Survey of Israeli Racism: 58% of Jews Label Their State ‘Apartheid’
Really, no getting around the fact that racism is prevalent in Israel.
Mmmm hmmm.
That transparent organization isn’t of the same sort as your List of People Whose Names Sound Jewish And Might Be Engaged In Jewish Treachery, Maybe. Or your claim that the Zionists control the United States’ government and media, from the “top down.” Or your claim that somehow even SDMB mods are in on it and they’re afraid to reveal their true Zionist ideology. And now you’re actually of the belief that Dopers are not only out to get you, but they’re organized in that pursuit.
Have you considered sharing these ideas with other people?
I don’t think anyone would deny that Israel has problems with racism - really, with bigotry of all sorts: ethnic, religious, racial, social, what-have-you.
However, pretty well all nations in the world have such problems to some degree. Certainly, neither the US nor Canada is immune to bigotry and ethnic clashes. In my own country, there is Quebec independence and resulting tensions; there is right now a quasi-revolt by the native Canadian population against the harsh conditions they are subjected to known as the “idle no more” movement, resulting in blockades and road closures - and Canada is (allegedly) one of the best countries in the world from this perspective.
Moreover, as any Israeli could tell you, ethnic tensions and problems of bigotry are by no means unilateral. Tensions within the Jewish community are as significant as, if not more significant than, tensions between Arab-Israelis and Jewish-Israelis: secular Jews and the ultra-orthodox don’t get on well.
I don’t see how pointing out that Israel has such issues really makes any difference. Israel is hardly unique in having such troubles.
Q10. A well-known American writer boycotts Israel claiming that it practices apartheid. Which of the following statements you most agree to: 1) to counter-boycott her, 2) not to react in any way, 3) to ask her to visit the country.
Results for Q10:
- Counter-Boycott her: 15%
- No reaction: 28%
- Invite her to visit: 48%
- Don’t know: 9%
Q11. Regarding the author’s claim that Israel practices apartheid, what is closest to your point of view: 1) There is no apartheid in Israel at all, 2) There is apartheid in some issues, 3) There is apartheid in many issues, 4) Don’t know.
Results for Q11.
- No apartheid at all: 31%
- Apartheid in some issues: 39%
- Apartheid in many issues: 19%
- Don’t know: 11%
I don’t know what to make of this. Apartheid is undefined prior to the questions. I would love to compare these answers to an identical poll in the US (say vs. the non-Caucasian population). Do random people think apartheid is a good or a bad thing ? Do they understand what it is and distinguish apartheid from other types of discrimination ? If apartheid is thought to be a bad thing, would 48% invite her to visit and 28% would not react ? Also, if it is a bad thing, it seems remarkable that 58% would acknowledge that Israel practices that. Maybe Israelis are very critical of themselves. I, for one, would be more concerned about the 31% claiming everything is fine.
It is quite clear to me that most people rightly interpreted the questions in terms of discrimination. There are some kinds of discrimination that are life result- driven, i.e. similar to clams in the US that blacks and Hispanics are discriminated against, and some (very few) legal discriminations, the most important being the Law of Return.
Also, the attempt to judge the reality in such a way, seems to be a bit similar to trying to judge a person mental status by asking him: “Are you psychotic ?”.
I should also remind you that 92% of Americans believe in God, down from 98% in 1967. I hope that you will use the same exacting scientific standards and deduce God exists, based on this Gallop poll.
In any case, those poor, discriminated against Arab Israeli citizens have full medical insurance, social security, child support and free 13 years of education in their own language, have a longer life expectancy than the US blacks and Hispanics, have free press, religious institutions, etc. and vote for their representatives in the Knesset.
Coming from a country that had serious discrimination (and probably apartheid) until the 60’s, and whose own saint and founding father Thomas Jefferson owned 200 slaves and speculated that blackness might come “from the color of the blood” and concluded that blacks were “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.”, a country which is the world’s leader jailer, and more specifically a country in which one is 6 times more likely to be incarcerated if one is a black person rather that a white one, a country in which most people belive that earth was created 6,000 years ago, a country that directly killed thousands and indirectly hundeds of thousands in Iraq and daily bombs villages in Afghanistan – countries thousands of miles away, a country that is obsessed with possessing guns, but unable to provide minimal health care to millions, well, I think you, Red Fury, have many issues closer to home to be furious about, instead having a fixation with us Israelis.