I took these statistics courses in graduate school and along with everyone else I hated them vocally - until it came time to validate my research of course. The expression "Statistics, damned statistics and lies!" was our summary of the experience. Wait, was it the other way 'round? Well, my WikiSource tells me this:

The saying "lies, damned lies, and statistics" is attributed to Mark Twain, though he himself credited the phrase to the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli. It's worth noting that there's no record of Disraeli ever saying it. 

And back when Britain had a backbone, there was this statement from former British PM Sir Winston Churchill:

"The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself"

Some folks love to quote statistics. Sometimes the quotation is actually significant. When Dad was giving Construction Safety lectures, he'd hold up a bottle of 100 pills and say that 97 of them were sugar but 3 of them would kill and ask if anyone wanted to try one. The point was that 3% of industrial accidents were fatal but were part of a larger statistic of careless behaviours.

That was a good demonstration, and hopefully workers remembered it and were a little more mindful. But, I've read postings - many re-posts right here on Facebook - that suggest or attempt to give credence to some truly outlandish notions by suggesting or outright stating that a few examples represent the deadly norm.

All Moslems are required as an article of faith to work for the eradication of the state of Israel.

Moslem women must be veiled and can't go out in public unless accompanied by a male relative.

Moslem law permits the killing of women who do not obey religious laws.

The problem for me and other liberals is that some of those notions are believed and acted upon by some Muslims, and that gives the critics lots of ammunition. The term "honour killing" is a reprehensible excuse for outright murder and is just as deranged as "ethnic cleansing" whether in 1930s Europe or today's Gaza.

Islamic scholars may refute the erroneous interpretations and write learned papers on Qu'ranic studies that give an historical and modern perspective on issues ranging from homosexuality to veiling, and I've read a few of them. Those scholars, however, are writing learned papers; they are not power-hungry zealots lecturing impoverished, unschooled, often illiterate and marginalized refugees, or in some cases, their next-door neighbours in affluent suburbs, because evil stupidity is an opportunist no matter the time or place.

It's too easy to point out the silly or criminal practices of other ethnic and religious groups, but we do need to distinguish the one from the other. Men in ecclestastical gowns may seem silly; child molestation is criminal. Women in medieval habits with shaved heads under veils may seem silly; beating children for speaking their mother tongue is child abuse. And let's not go into the Catholic-Protestant conflicts from Luther to now with the bonfires and beheadings. Or into the Shia vs Sunni murderous schism of Islam. Or the caste system of Hindus and the nasty practice they had of tossing wives onto the funeral pyres of departed husbands.

And as a short but interesting digression, "caste" is a term that applies globally with its most distinguishing quality being skin colour. Even historically, pink people such as myself have gone from "pale is good" because it meant we didn't labour in the sun to "brown is good" because it meant we had the leisure to play in the sun. Go figure. Or go read Caste by  Isobel Wilkerson and get a disconcerting but scholarly summary of that history.

Israeli apologists will self-righteously ask why protesters are so concerned about anti-semitic and misogynistic practices by people in North America, but support anti-semitism and misanthropic behaviours by Moslems (who they believe are all Hamas militants) in the rest of the world? Spoiler alert: They don't and the research will not support even a cursory examination of data, but I didn't like stats either, so hang onto your hate if you have to.

One case does not a conviction make, unless your convictions are already secured in some impenetrable part of your psyche. You can notice the bad and the silly and the criminal but don't get carried away. This is Judy Haiven on the subject because she says it better on her substack than I could:

Do the Canes of Gaza’s Elderly Fire Bullets?

Judy Haiven substack Oct. 23, 2025

Is every Palestinian in Gaza really a terrorist? Is there a Hamas bomb-making plant, or arms stash, in underground tunnels beneath families’ homes in now-toppled buildings? Where is the evidence that more than 30 Gaza hospitals, before the IDF destroyed them, had secret tunnels to hide armed Hamas militants? Are most of the wheelchairs for the elderly booby-trapped? Like in a James Bond film, do their crutches and canes also fire bullets?

Maybe some Palestinians voted for Hamas; others voted for Fatah; maybe some Gazans didn’t vote at all.

Just like in Canadian elections. In Gaza, Hamas won.

Maybe you voted for the Liberals in the last election because you worried what Poilievre and the Tories would do to the country. It’s embarrassing to admit that you who normally votes NDP –voted Liberal– because right now PM Carney’s doing what you were afraid of. But after our general election, you would have had a hard time saying the whole country supported the Liberals. In the 2025 election, the Liberals won 43.76% of the popular vote, and 169 seats in Parliament—a minority government; the Tories got 41.3% of the popular vote—144 seats. The Bloc Québécois got 6.3% of the votes cast translating to 22 seats. The NDP and the Greens shared the scraps– 8 seats. But no one would seriously say the whole country supported the Liberals.

Yet that is what we hear all the time from Israel and its allies such as the US, Britain and France. Everyone in Gaza – every wife, every mother of six, every school teacher, doctor, surgeon, grandmother and street vendor – is Hamas. Or at least that each supports Hamas wildly, enthusiastically. So the civilians are all “terrorists”. And their terror cells are everywhere – though there is zero evidence of cells under the hospitals, or in the schools or mosques. So it’s okay for Israel to bomb Palestinians’ homes; collapse their apartment buildings with thousands of mainly women and children still inside; shut off their electricity, and sewage pumps; kill access to fresh water; bomb hospitals; flatten their schools and turn every one of Gaza’s dozen universities into rubble. I wonder how many of Gaza’s 4,000 child, and baby amputees worked for Hamas? How many of the seniors who lie amidst the rubble, or sleep on the bare ground under tents made of plastic garbage bags served as Hamas operatives over the last two years?

The outrageous lie that all Palestinians are terrorists is perpetuated by the IDF, the Israeli government and the pro-Israel lobby. According to Israel’s foreign ministry, last month’s vote in the UN to recognise the Palestinian state was “nothing but a reward for jihadist Hamas”.

Israel’s minister of finance, right wing xenophobe Belzalel Smotrich “called for the Palestinian town of Hawara in the West Bank to be “erased” after radical Jewish settlers rampaged through the town in response to a shooting attack that killed two Israelis. Smotrich later apologized after an international uproar.”

And still, there are these angry postings from, well it says it's from somone who subscribes to Muslim_Zionist18. They are also a source for horriffic cartoons showing bearded Arabic-looking creatures with scimitars or Ak47s standing before the bodies of innocents, holding up babies and pleading for protection from those nasty Jews. Here's another:

I still can't get over the fact that the people who have murdered innocent Israelis, raped Israeli women, and killed Jewish babies with their bare hands have convinced Ivy League students that they are the resistance.

          @Muslim_Zionist18

This next item is from my search for information on "the rules of war" and Islam.

As one expert of international humanitarian law (IHL) and Islamic law put it: “Islam has always handcuffed its fighters’ hands.”

“While according sanction to fighting in self-defence…[the Koran] enjoins concurrently, humanitarian rules of warfare to mitigate the human suffering it inflicts,” writes former Pakistani Foreign Minister Agha Shahi in his book The Role of Islam in Contemporary International Relations.

“Fight in the way of Allah with those who fight with you, and do not exceed the limits,” says the Muslim holy book, the Koran, “surely Allah (God) does not love those who exceed the limits.”

Much like in IHL, “Muslim jurists balanced practical interests against various imperatives,” writes Khaled Abou El Fadl, a professor of Islamic jurisprudence at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). “Muslim juristic discourses were neither purely functional nor moralistic. Even more, they were far from dogmatic or essentialist in nature.”

The actions and statements of the Prophet Muhammad and of the early Caliphs of Islam point to strong humanitarian considerations.

In a famous decree, Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, the first Caliph, told his military commander: “Stop, O people, that I may give you ten rules for guidance on the battlefield. Do not commit treachery or deviate from the right path. You must not mutilate dead bodies; do not kill a woman, a child, or an aged man; do not cut down fruitful trees; do not destroy inhabited areas; do not slaughter any of the enemies’ sheep, cow or camel except for food; do not burn date palms, nor inundate them; do not embezzle (e.g. no misappropriation of booty or spoils of war) nor be guilty of cowardliness…You are likely to pass by people who have devoted their lives to monastic services; leave them alone."

That sounds like it could have been written by Lord Baden Powell. And yet still, on Oct 7, 2023, there were real atrocities committed by an invading force of Hamas fighters, and the investigating committee of the United Nations did cite some of those fighters for "war crimes" and the commander of those forces did say, "We lost control" of some units. 

And there have been Muslim suicide bombers who killed indiscriminately. Those crimes should be addressed and the perpetrators who radicalized others to do their killing for them really should be brought to justice. Would you then, also support Noam Chomsky in his bid to have Henry Kissinger declared a war criminal? Or George W. Bush going after those "weapons of mass destruction" with the massive civilian and military death toll that ensued?

Closer to home, we have student protests at university campuses. I talked to some of those students last summer here at an encampment at Uvic. No one said, and I saw no signs reading, "Death to America". There were instead, polite requests for bottled water and granola bars if we really wanted to offer support.

Watching reports from some media folk south of the border, Bill Maher forcefully among them, one could get the impression that all students were chanting for the death of Americans and Israelis. The point is that my experience was no more representative of all student protests than were those of other individuals. In such cases we ask that rules of conduct be enforced, and universities have those rules, none of which to my knowledge, called for baton-wielding police to disperse the kids - and again, that didn't happen in all cases.

The genocide in Gaza is having a statistical impact in many areas of our social lives, entertainment being a large part thereof - and if it sounds crass to put genocide and entertainment in the same sentence, it is. That is the thrust of doctoral student Kendall Gardiner in her article for Vashti, a British online arts and culture journal from a "Jewish left perspective".  In "Jazz hands and hollow gestures — watching a play is not political action" 24 Oct. 2025, she has this to say:

When the ticket revenue from the rave ultimately fattens the wallets of war criminals, the party needs to end…

While filmmakers, actors, musicians, and academics give standing ovations to depictions of genocide, the horrors in Gaza continue. Even under the recently announced ceasefire, Israel continues to murder Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank with impunity. As Hamdan Ballal Al-Huraini wrote for Vashti after his film No Other Land won an Academy Award: “Yes, we have an Oscar – but where is international law, which was established to protect civilians and innocents? We have received every accolade – but we want your conscience.” I’d go a step further – we must offer more than conscience, we must offer action.

The kids on campus give that action. Statistically now, more universities in the States are listening. In Canada, we're still firing or refusing employment to a lot of people voicing their opposition to the humanitarian crisis inflicted on Palestinians and we're doing it at the behest of organizations still fattening "the wallets of war criminals". Here's the evidence; you do the math and then take what action you can, even to address a statistically small part of the problem.

https://www.readthemaple.com/a-list-of-some-people-in-canada-fired-for-pro-palestine-views/

https://www.cjpme.org/apr_report_2022

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/chilling-effect-pro-palestinian-1.7064510