112% Of Israeli Jews Think Incompetent Poll-Takers Should Be Shot

A further 102% said they should merely be flayed alive, then expelled to the Gaza Strip.

Tel Aviv, March 13 – A new survey of Israeli public opinion and attitudes reveals that more than 100% of Jewish citizens believe that pollsters who fail to conduct their research properly should be extrajudicially executed, researchers report.

In an article in the journal Statistics, the authors of the study describe how they set out to measure the reaction of the Israeli public to recent reports, based on a badly phrased question, that ostensibly showed a majority of Jewish Israelis favoring the expulsion of Arab citizens. The new study, conducted via the internet on a voluntary basis, solicited the opinions of users on a niche web site, then took the data and interpreted it to mean that of the 45 individuals surveyed, 50 wanted incompetent poll-takers to be shot on sight.

Lead author Kai Skver said the poll indicates the sorry state of Israeli democracy. “It is a sad day indeed when so many people seem to have it in for our profession simply for the way we report things,” he wrote in the article’s analysis. “While we were surprised to find that minus-five percent thought we were doing a good job, the most disturbing aspect of this survey, to me, is the lack of awareness among the public regarding what statistics are and what they mean.”

Skver noted that the findings have disturbing political implications. “Almost every party or election campaign relies on faulty polling to some degree,” he continued. “That puts every election campaign – and by extension, every elected official – on the wrong side, in the public’s opinion, to an unprecedented degree.”

The study also found that in addition to the 112% of Jewish Israelis who believe bad poll designers should be shot, a further 102% said they should merely be flayed alive, then expelled to the Gaza Strip. The question covering that option was left purposely vague out of concerns for political sensitivity, but a member of the polling team explained how it could be interpreted to reflect the cited figure.

“We need funding,” said Cora Layshin. “The only way to get that is to attract attention. In the current economic environment, the only way to do that is to publish outlandish, tendentious poll results, so the left-leaning media has material to peddle and still seem relevant to the right-leaning majority. So ambiguous results are refracted through the economic lens, which paints a clear picture of a bloodthirsty, bigoted Israeli Jewish polity whose supposed attitudes can then be held up as proof that more funding is needed for the virtuous Left to regain hegemony.”

“It’s not exactly statistics as we were taught in university, but if the New Israel Fund and the European Commission are paying, I’m not complaining,” she added.