By: Michael Freund – The Jerusalem Post; jpost.com
Failure to properly count the number of Palestinian terror attacks necessarily minimizes their importance, suggesting that they and their victims don’t really matter.
A number of years ago, on a visit to Manhattan, I entered one of the countless souvenir stores that dot the area in Times Square which are affectionately known as “tourist traps.”
Amid the refrigerator magnets declaring one’s love for New York, the fake subway signs and plastic snow globes enveloping the Statue of Liberty, I came across a hidden treasure that I continue to adore until this very day. It is a small purple pin which declares simply and with unvarnished irony: “Forty percent of all statistics are false.”
If you have even a sliver of cynicism somewhere in your body and you take a moment and think about that sentence, it should bring a smile to your face because it sums up quite nicely what most of us already know to be true. In our data-drenched world, statistics are just about as reliable as pre-election promises made by politicians.
My thoughts turned to that pin the other day when I read through the US State Department’s “2019 Country Report on Human Rights Practices: Israel, West Bank, and Gaza,” which was released on March 2 of this year. It contains what can most charitably be described as nothing less than an obscene distortion of reality.