Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: statistics

Showing posts with label statistics. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 22, 2023

Recent EoZ memes, posters, cartoons....

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Once again, Save the Children lies about Palestinian kids supposedly tortured by Israel

Last month, Save the Children issued a press release:

Palestinian children in the Israel military detention system face physical and emotional abuse, with four out of five (86%) of them being beaten, and 69% strip-searched, according to new research by Save the Children. Nearly half (42%) are injured at the point of arrest, including gunshot wounds and broken bones. Some report violence of a sexual nature and some are transferred to court or between detention centres in small cages, the child rights organisation said.

Save the Children’s new consultation showed that:

During arrest, 42% of children were injured, including gunshot wounds and broken bones, and 65% of children were arrested during the night, mostly between midnight and dawn. Half of all arrests took place in the children’s home.
The majority of children experienced appalling levels of physical and emotional abuse, including being beaten (86%), being threatened with harm (70%), and hit with sticks or guns (60%).
Some children reported violence and abuse of a sexual nature, including being hit or touched on the genitals and 69% reported being strip searched.
60% of children experienced solitary confinement with the length of time varying from one 1 day to as long as 48 days.
Children were denied access to basic services, 70% said they suffered from hunger and 68% said they didn’t receive any healthcare.
58% of children were denied visits or communication with their family while detained.

Wow! The vast majority of Palestinian kids arrested are beaten, nearly half are physically injured, and more than half are placed in solitary confinement!

Then, Save the Children describes its methodology.

In total, 228 former child detainees participated in this study by Save the Children and YMCA. This includes 177 children who responded to surveys and 51 who took part in focus group discussions. A further two focus group discussions were held with parents whose children had been detained. ...
A combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches, including surveys and focus groups, was applied, to ensure that the perspectives and experiences of Palestinian children who experienced arrest and detention were at the core of the study.

This is an embarrassing methodology that would shame any credible researcher.

The surveys have, by their very nature, self-selection bias. Only children and parents with a desire to tell their stories will choose to answer the questions, anyone who had an uneventful arrest won't bother answering a survey that is meant to prove Israel tortures kids.

Save the Children does not publish the methodology of how they determined who to send the surveys to, or the survey questions, which were probably leading questions based on what we know from previous Save the Children reports.

The focus groups are even worse. The biases seen in focus groups are well known. The moderator can ask leading questions. Those who spin lurid stories of torture would tend to monopolize the discussion, influencing the other kids in the group to want to embellish their own stories.

Save the Children says nothing about any professional training or expertise their moderators and facilitators have to minimize bias in their responses.

And when they say they use "qualitative approaches" you know that means that they will weight whatever the kids say towards the worst possible interpretation for Israel.

The names of the researchers are not mentioned, nor is the author of the press release. It is completely opaque - and this is not an accident.

The full report shows how absurd the interviews are. B'Tselem statistics show that the number of children under 14 held in prison is almost always zero, and it is difficult to find one or more children at that age in prison for two consecutive months. But somehow Save the Children finds several 13-year olds who claim they were in horrible conditions in prison:

“Sometimes they broke into our prison cells and made us stand in the cold air outside. They didn’t allow us to sleep. One night, they broke the roof and we had to spend the night with the rain pouring into our room....They hit me with their hands and rifles, everywhere, especially on my private parts.”” Yousef*, detained when he was 13

“For me, the transfer bus was the worst. There is a tiny box inside that barely fits one person; what they would do is put two of us together in that box handcuffed to each other and driven around all day. They would drive us for hours, from early in the morning to late at night, just locked in that box....I used to have nightmares about my time in prison all the time, especially about the officer who interrogated me. He told me, ‘I promise you that you will dream about me’. And he was right.” Khalil*, detained when he was 13

None of this rings true. But Save the Children wants to issue a report that will make a splash, so they are not interested in the truth.

In fact, it quotes even less reliable reports as fact - such as the PLO's Commission for Prisoners and Freed Prisoners which claimed minors "became victims of the sexual lust of their jailers from the Nahshon forces without consideration for their age."

Perhaps this is why this survey did not get any publicity outside of outlets like Al Jazeera and Palestine Chronicle. It is obvious even to anti-Israel media that the results of the "survey" are so out of whack with reality that their publicizing it would hurt their own credibility.

Save the Children deliberately does everything possible to get the most lurid results for publication - and then quote these "statistics" as if they are scientifically valid.

After all, if there is no torture, they can't raise funds.

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The Washington Post humanizes terrorists - and doesn't do basic fact checks

Washington Post reporters are very proud of themselves for scoring an interview with the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades:

Zoufi is the commander of the camp’s branch of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is listed as a terrorist group by Israel and the United States. He founded the armed militant cell just over a year ago as Israeli military raids spiked across the West Bank.

The Washington Post spent time with him and some of his 15 fighters, as well as with militants in two other Palestinian refugee camps — Jenin and Askar — over three days in July. The visits, agreed to on the condition that full names and specific locations be withheld, afforded a rare window into the lives and actions of fighters on one side of the worst violence to grip the West Bank in decades.

...Making contact with Zoufi and his fighters meant navigating a clandestine network of intermediaries inside the camps. After being handed off by a string of trusted escorts — walking along narrow lanes laced with sagging electric cables and papered with posters of slain fighters — the Post reporters were led to a room deep inside Balata Camp.
Several men there were eating mana’eesh, a flatbread with za’atar. Weapons rested in their laps or against the walls.
“Welcome. Yalla, join us,” said one man, known in the camp as Goblin.

It is exactly what we have seen countless times before - humanizing terrorists and trusting what they say implicitly while including the bare minimum of Israeli "claims."

I found this paragraph interesting:

The fighters, who inspire both fear and fealty, enjoy cultlike status in the camp. There are no sports teams here. Male unemployment is nearing 90 percent. With few role models of any kind, boys collect stickers, posters and necklaces bearing images of slain militants.

The male unemployment rate in the West Bank altogether is 12.4% (2021). UNRWA says that for all camps, it is 17%. This site says the Balata camp's unemployment rate is 25%. I cannot find any source that says it has an unemployment rate anywhere close to 90%.

The Washington Post does not provide a link to this statistic. It appears that someone they interviewed made it up and they parroted it.

And what, exactly, stops Balata's residents from finding jobs? It isn't Israel. Residents can move out of the camp and go wherever they want in the West Bank. They can get jobs in Israel the way tens of thousands of other Palestinians do.

The only difference is that they have free housing, courtesy of the world paying UNRWA.

Moreover, why is the camp still only a single square kilometer? Why doesn't the Palestinian Authority expand the boundaries so the people aren't so crowded? It isn't Lebanon, and there are open spaces outside the camp.

It is true that there are no sports teams in the overcrowded camp itself. But Balata, the town, does have a sports club - the Ahly Balata club - which includes an entire sports and youth program that also teaches job skills to teens.

According to Google Maps, it is easy walking distance from the camp.

The "90% unemployment" and the "no sports teams for kids" were factoids that were too good to check for the WaPo's reporting team. And for their editors.

How many other things were they told that are simply terrorist propaganda? And why are they so willing to swallow it?

I asked that question in the comments on the article. We'll see if anything changes.

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Anti-Jewish hate crimes in NYC continues to dwarf all others

Here is a chart showing the categories of hate crimes in New York City for the first half of the year.

Out of 235 incidents, 108 were anti-Jewish. This is a little less than half but still much, much more than any other kind of bias.

In 2022, 43% of all hate crimes in New York City were against Jews.

I am sure that the NYPD takes antisemitic incidents seriously, but - this is a lot. And it indicates that the usual ways of fighting hate need to be customized for anti-Jewish hate. For example, the NYPD keeps track of the race of the offenders and the districts the crimes occur in - if there is a clear pattern, that could indicate a more specific plan for combating anti-Jewish hate rather than just using the same methods as for all other hate crimes. After all, Jews are often targeted for the perception of being privileged, unlike most other bias crimes.

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UN-OCHA moving the goalposts to make Israel look bad

The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs of the Palestinian territories comes out with a report every month about imports, exports, entrances and exits from Gaza.

In its report on June, it says:

In June, the Israeli authorities allowed 42,220 exits of people from Gaza (in most cases, travelers exited multiple times). This is 13 per cent higher than the exits in May, and 19 per cent higher than the monthly average in 2022. However, it is 92 per cent lower than the monthly average in 2000, before the imposition of category-based restrictions by the Israeli authorities.

They are comparing the number of exits with 2000 - when thousands of Israelis still lived in Gaza and traveled freely in and out every day? Before the second intifada when checkpoints needed to be enforced? Of course the number of exits will never be nearly as high as in 2000; the borders were porous then.

If they were to compare with any previous year, they should - and normally do - compare it to the time between Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, and when Israel started restrictions on Gaza after Hamas violently took over the territory in 2007. Otherwise it is comparing apples to oranges.

So let's look at previous UN charts.

Here's a UN chart from 2016 that was already deceptive: starting in 2004 when Israelis left Gaza so part of the year there were many, many more exits; and showing that in March 2006 Israel started its restrictions on Gaza workers. So if there is any year that the UN should compare against, it is 2005.

In 2005, the monthly average of exits was 31,424. Today, it is significantly higher - as mentioned, over 42,000 last month, and in fact earlier this year it surpassed 50,000 some months.

The headline should be that Israel now allows more freedom of movement for Gazans than at any time since Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. But the UN cannot have a headline that makes Israel look good, can it? So instead of comparing to 2004 or 2005, as it always did before now, it makes up a new benchmark: 2000, a completely artificial and irrelevant date.

Here is UN-OCHA's new chart where they, for the first time, added the year 2000 with its "0.5 million" figure - just to minimize how much Israel is doing to make Gazan's lives easier.

This is lying with statistics.

(correction on years h/t Irene)

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UNRWA spreads bogus statistics to other NGOs

This is a strange one.

The Development Initiatives website used to have very extensive statistics on aid given, both from donors and to which recipients. But its latest report only discusses the top ten recipients, and this year the Palestinians are not listed among the top ten - they had been at or near the top from the early 2000s to at least 2015.

But it does mention the Palestinians in a different context.

In "Figure 2.6: The numbers of forcibly displaced people across the globe increased by almost 20% between 2021 and 2022, to more than 100 million people," it gives numbers of "forcibly displaced" people in "Palestine" for 2021 and 2022:

It says that the number of "forcibly displaced" Palestinians in the territories increased from 2.4 million to 2.9 million in only one year.

The footnotes say that it got these statistics from UNRWA: "Data is organised according to UNHCR's definitions of country/territory of asylum. According to data provided by UNRWA, registered Palestine refugees are included as refugees for Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. UNHCR data represents 2022 mid-year figures, and UNRWA data for 2022 is based on internal estimates."

First of all, it is absurd to say that the number of UNRWA registered refugees in the West Bank and Gaza increased by 21% in one year. There was no new influx of refugees to the territories and natural growth increase is nowhere near that number.

Secondly, to call people who pretend to be "refugees from Palestine" but who live in Palestine "refugees," and not even "internally displaced persons." is equally absurd.

Thirdly, UNRWA themselves publishes these statistics, so there was no reason for UNRWA to provide an "estimate" for 2022. According to them, in the fourth quarter of 2021 there were 2,400,208 "registered refugees" in the territories, in the fourth quarter of 2022 there were 2,454,903. That is an increase of 2%, not 20%.

It is possible that someone made a mistake - if a decimal point moved from an increase of 50,000 to 500,000, that would explain this discrepancy. But still, this is something that should have been checked.

One other interesting anomaly: according to this chart, a small but not insignificant number of "refugees" are seeking asylum in the Palestinian territories themselves. Where are they from? They couldn't be Palestinian - are they Africans who managed to make it to Gaza or the West Bank? The Palestinian Basic Law does not have any section about asylum seekers, and gives only a general statement about citizenship being regulated by law.

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The number of mega-large families supported by UNRWA is ballooning. Something isn't adding up.

The more you dig into UNRWA's own website, the sketchier it looks.

UNRWA has a population dashboard showing statistics of those it gives services to (much more than their already wildly inflated "registered refugee" count.)

It shows the size of families that it helps. And some of them are unusually large.

As of the first quarter of this year, UNRWA supports 1642 families of size 15-19, 167 sized 20-24, 36 sized 25-29 and 4 with over 30 members.

The number of mega-families supported, with more than 14 members, has skyrocketed since 2020, going up an astonishing 17%, from 1585 to 1851! The number of families from 10-14 members also went up a great deal, by 14%. At the same time the number of "refugees" only went up by 4.5%.

So what's going on?

There is an outside possibility that there are a few families with over 25 members, because UNRWA allowed men with multiple wives to register. And if the patriarch is a "refugee" then his wives and children are all considered "refugees" as well.

But there is also a good chance that families simply do not tell UNRWA when family members die. Why would they? UNRWA doesn't check, as far as I can tell - they seem to ask people to register deaths on the honor system using an app. Palestinians have been known to not report deaths of family members since the agency began.

Looking at it another way, the population dashboard claims that there are 480461 "refugees" over the age of 70 today (not counting the many non-refugees receiving UNRWA services.) The total number of UNRWA refugees in 1953 was 900,000.

Does it make sense that half the people of all ages living in 1953 are alive today?

They are saying that about 9% of all "refugees" receiving services alive today are over 70, when the population of Palestinians within the area of the British Mandate over 70 stands at about 2%.

UNRWA is not reporting anything close to accurate numbers, and they are exaggerating the number of people they serve a great deal.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!