Statistics somewhat misleading

Submitted by Chuck A. (United States), Oct 17, 2007 at 03:31

First, I want to say that I am a strong supporter of Israel and I do believe the reporting of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been outrageously distorted to make Israel look bad. These raw numbers of total deaths do put the Arab-Israeli conflict in perspective compared to the magnitude of killing that takes place world-wide.

That being said, these numbers are also misleading from a statistical perspective since they compare populations of different size, in some cases vastly different. A truer measure of lethality would be to compare mortality rates (expressed for instance as deaths per thousand). While it's not as dramatic, the Arab-Israel conflict would still be at least an order of magnitude less lethal than the worst conflicts in this list.

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