Israel ranked close to bottom of latest “Global Peace Index” with human rights ranking on a par with North Korea and Iran
The global NGO community is at it again. According to this year’s Global Peace Index, released by the widely respected Vision of Humanity grouping, Israel ranks 141 out of 144 countries surveyed. Only Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq are ranked lower. In terms of human rights, Israel is ranked at the same level as North Korea and Iran. Indeed, apart from Iran and Yemen, all of the countries in the Middle East are given a higher ranking.
The index draws its inspiration from a United Nations initiative in 1999 when, according to the report’s authors, “the UN General Assembly launched a programme of action to build a “culture of peace” for the world’s children, which envisaged working towards a positive peace of justice, tolerance and plenty.” No real mystery then over what is about to follow.
The rankings are constructed out of 23 indicators of internal and external peace. These include factors such as the number of conflicts fought over the last five years, the potential for terrorism, ease of access to weapons, and human rights. Each category is graded on a scale of one to five, where one is the best score and five the worst.
Ostensibly, the survey is a value-neutral study which highlights objective realities about a nation’s predicament. The top ranked country in the study is New Zealand which makes sense given the nation’s remoteness and the absence of violent neighbours. Israel, a country under the constant threat of terrorism and living under the shadow of countries such as Iran which call for its destruction, would, logically enough, be given a relatively low ranking.
But this survey is anything but value-neutral, as closer inspection of its attitudes to human rights makes abundantly clear.
Israel was given a four point ranking in this category — the second worst possible and on a par with North Korea and Iran. Even more absurdly, Saudi Arabia’s ranking on human rights was actually higher than Israel’s. Saudi got a score of 3.5, as did China.
According to the report’s methodology, in category 4 countries, “murders, disappearances and torture are a common part of life.” If you look even deeper into the survey, it becomes clear precisely who is behind this. The report says that its human rights segment was based on, “A qualitative measure of the level of political terror through an analysis of Amnesty International’s Yearbook.”
Knowing smiles all around then. I think that the important point to recognise here goes beyond rhetorical questions of the type: What kind of automatons could produce a purportedly serious report which gives liberal-democratic Israel the same human rights ranking as North Korea and a worse one than Saudi Arabia’s or China’s? Or, At which point precisely did the authors of this report have their brains removed? Such questions are all well and good.
However, this is in fact a quotable case study of how intrinsic anti-Israeli bias in the global NGO community has now become systemic. Reasonably enough, such NGOs feed off each other in order to add substance and credibility to their work. But if the system has been infected at some point with a virus this then makes it inevitable that it will spread throughout. Anti-Israel sentiment, of course, fits precisely into this category.
Vision of Humanity teamed up with the Economist Intelligence Unit (part of the Economist group) for this report and the index is part of the Institute for Economics and Peace. The index is endorsed by no less than 10 Nobel laureates and dozens of eminent individuals and organisations including Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and the former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Richard Branson, Professor James Galbraith, and Wim Wenders, Film Director and President, European Film Academy.
To read the report in full click on the following link:
http://www.visionofhumanity.org/gpi/results/rankings/2009/
Tags: Israel
July 30th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Is there any way to protest this report, and if so, is there any point? After all, how does this have any effect on our day-to-day lives in Israel or outside it?
July 30th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
This index is worthless. For example a country which spends 40% of GDP on Defence gets marked down, irrespective of whether that country has a hisory of belligerence or not.
The analysts also mark Israel down because ‘criminality is perceived to be high’. In reality crime in Israel is extremely low.
A clue as to the worthlessness of the index is that the compilers do not provide the raw data on their website to enable readers to replicate and comment upon the results.
July 31st, 2009 at 12:09 am
Same human rights level as Iran!?!?!!
You know what they should do… they should survey Gaza and the West Bank. All the honour killings, Hamas’ sinister “virtue campaign” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/palestinianauthority/5925691/Hamas-launches-virtue-campaign-in-Gaza.html
They’ll have to come up with a new scale for all that. Although they’d probably still manage to find a way to make Israel look worse than Hamas.
July 31st, 2009 at 10:01 am
Looking at the methodology on “Vision of Humanity’s” website, I suspect that in the early years of World War Two (before the facts about the Holocaust became known), Britain would have come low down in their rankings, close to or possibly even below Germany.
July 31st, 2009 at 10:28 am
Its almost as if this is a ready made report for the BBC to continue their war against Israel.
July 31st, 2009 at 11:43 pm
If a measurment technique gave rise to results that were obviously in error, then the first thing to question is whether the method of measurement is not itself at fault. If not, then the person conducting the experiment may have injected bias.
This result of Israel having lower human rights figure then Saudi Arabia, is a clear case of a faulty measurement technique or bias.
August 3rd, 2009 at 4:20 am
Great article Robin. It would be nice to know the email addresses of those 10 Nobel prizewinners so tha I could ‘drop them a line’.
DaveP - Probably faulty measurement. Couldn’t be ‘bias’ could it?
August 3rd, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Another depressing milestone in the dark and historically well worn path being re-explored before our eyes. As many people have pointed out it is conspicuously stupid (to use a neutral term) in its methodology and unsurprisingly bizarre in its “conclusions”; but look who is behind it. Anglo-american wtf?
I see that most of the useful idiots who constitute the “Expert Panel” occupy pretentious academic roles in undistinguished institutions disproptionately in those (suprise suprise) top-ranking havens of “peace” (and models of racial integration) Australia and New Zealand; and the only UK academic who has put his name to this poison is Director of the Post-War Reconstruction and Development Unit at the University of York. No me neither - I dont think York has played such a distinguished role in International affairs since Constantine was declared emperor there.
I think the appropriate response (after anger) is mockery; and I am going to personally e-mail each one of them with my Global Anti Semitism Index ranking derived, after extensive consultation, on the basis of my personal prejudices.