I think there is a double standard that is being applied and it is rationalized and back-propagated from a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived criticism of Israel.

All of the sudden statistical significance and probability distribution come in to play. I doubt it if New York times wrote an article about 3 or 4 racially motivated attacks in New York and wondered if there is resurgence in racism, if everyone would accuse it for "intolerance" for not presenting a statistical derivation of its conclusion. I don't know why discussing racism in a Middle East country is has to be such a touchy subject but it is.

>> I think there is a double standard that is being applied and it is rationalized and back-propagated from a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived criticism of Israel.

>> All of the sudden statistical significance and probability distribution come in to play.

You've got it completely backwards of course. Asking for statistical proof of racism should be the standard, and the criticism should be of those who don't have that proof, not of those who deviate and begin asking for it. It's pretty alarming and telling that those arguing that Israel is racist are blatantly complaining that too much proof is being asked of their accusations of racism. Any decent humanitarian should not want the accusation of racism to be thrown around so easily by the media, otherwise its potency as an accusation is diluted. As it has been by exactly the type articles like on Al Jazeera, and as evidenced by the number of people even in this thread who so casually accuse a country of racism by nothing more than HN posts and Wikipedia articles.

I think we are both making different default assumptions. My default assumptions seem to be that there is rampant racism in the Middle East stemming for thousands of years of complicated history. You default assumption is that there is no racism in Israel. I don't mind if articles pointing out the racism do not have rigorous statistical studies, but you do, because your default assumption are that there is no racism.

Right, you want it to be easy to just assume that an entire country has rampant racism because of some general perception of the middle east whereas I'm asking for evidence that any belief regarding racism in Israel is true. I don't have to prove there isn't racism in Israel to say "don't jump to hasty conclusions about a country being racist that can dilute accusation of racism and cause prejudice in itself."