clanko wrote:
Kraychik Kraychik Kraychik, I believe my initial comment was concerned with your need to deflect criticism away from Israel, however difficult. I am not particularly interested in corruption and don't believe it has much bearing on the Middle East. I find policies which are stamped by the Knesset a lot more worrying than Israeli statesmen getting caught with their fingers in the till. But come on seriously, the recent corruption allegations and scandals are pretty out of the ordinary, by Israeli or other liberal democracies' standards. I mean, that is not to discuss actual levels of verified corruption....but high-ranking officials in such succession?
You should be more careful with your language when you say "verified levels of corruption". Show a little humility with this statement, as corruption is clearly a difficult thing to geta measurement of. As far as your perception goes of Israel having a "unique" degree of corruption due to recent publicized scandals, it is unfortunate that I have to mention of how little use that is when quantifying corruption. It's just something subjective you've come up with based on anecdote, and as I said earlier there are countless scandals in Canada and the US (I can probably list close to twenty from recent years off the top of my head! And I am talking about high-ranking officials, such as the American VP, Canadian PM, Amerircan Governors, mayors, and congressmen...) to serve up a large volume of anecdotes for comparison.
Israel is the 33rd least-corrupt country in the world, the only country in the Arab world higher than this is Qatar at 28.
The evidence would suggest that Israel is substantially more corrupt than the United Kingdom, the US and Canada,yes.
Furthermore, the Democratic Index considers Israel a flawed democracy, unlike the US, UK and Canada which are all full democracies.
That's actually an interesting list, I stand somewhat corrected. After reading the methodologies (specifically the long one, as the short one is too simple to really undertand), it seems like as good a list as could be compiled given the information that's available towards constructing such a corruption-perception index. That doesn't change the inherent shortcomings of data collection used towards it construction, though. Much of the index you've listed is shared (thanks for sharing it, btw) on subjective polls done of business/country experts and laypersons. Of course this information isn't entirely useless, but clearly it has its limitations. Remember that this is a list measuring the perception of corruption, which is inherently a difficult thing to measure! I must concede that as far as I can tell, this list was compiled as well as it possible could have been, given the difficult nature of the project. More important than the ranking of a country on the list is a score (with higher numbers being correlated with higher levels of confidence in government with respect to corruption): with Israel scoring 6.0, the United States scoring 7.3, the United Kingdom scoring 7.7, and Canada scoring 8.7. Remember that these scored or compiled with a lot of subjective information (as well as objective, though). This paints a different picture than simply stating that Israel is number 33 on the list, behind Qatar! Clearly you intend to cherrypick information to denigrate Israel, as citing Israel's ranking as opposed to its score when compared to other countries makes it look much worse in terms of corruption.
Let me ask you, what is your interest in Israel's corruption? Do you have the same interested in the corruption of other countries? I would imagine that the people who have a genuine interest in Israel's corruption are stakeholders who are actually affected by it, rather than Israel-haters who like to look for things to criticize while ignoring anything positive. Considering that this is a forum dedicated to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, why are we even talking about corruption in Israel? If I was to start a thread focusing on a list that reflected Israel in a positive light with respect to something important (i.e aggressive GDP growth since its creation, per capita presence of high-ranked universities, etc), how relevant would that be to this forum and the Israeli/Palestinian discussion? Thread such as this (generally) are the equivalent of ad-hominem attacks against a country. The same is true for a similar thread with respect to Palestinian territories or political organizations. If someone is on trial for something (the parallel being Israel "on trial' by some for its security/military polcies), do we conduct dishonest character assasination in order to denigrate he/she who we are trying to convict? Clearly very few people in here give a you-know-what about Israel's corruption levels, but hey, if they can disparage Israel it may strengthen their argument against Israeli security/military policies! Let's be real, here.
Looking through this forum there is painfully LITTLE discussion (actually, I don't think I've seen any!) about how to move forward. Virtually nobody is discussing future ideas, but rather many are denigrating one side (mostly Israel) or the other. It's literally a battle of the insults. Who can make the other side look worse in one way or another?
I'll end my rant, there. But thanks fo the link, I found it very interesting. As I said, I stand somewhat corrected! I guess when arthur_two_sheds_jackson comes in and shares his meaningless one-liners, you come in as his valiant savior to provide some basis (via a link to the CPI, not to be mistaken with the more popular CPI!) to his silly statement. He's the mouthpiece and you're the brains, is that it?
- By ingliz
- By Doug64
- By JohnRawls