A friend of mine posted the following on his facebook wall yesterday (partly swedish, but should be comprehensible for most):

Terrordåd i Europa 2006-2009 enligt Europol:
Totalt antal: 1770
Islamic: 6 (0.34%)
Right Wing Ethno-Nationalist and Separatist: 1596 (90.17%)
…Left Wing: 106 (5.99%)
…Other/Not Specified: 62 (3.50%)
tack för statistiken

What I took notice of is that Islamic terrorism seem to be the least of our worries, regarding Europe as a whole. Which is startling considering how often one hears, mostly right wing, politicians cry wolf about this relatively insignificant source of terror.

I couldn’t get myself to do put the message on my own profile without verifying the sources and numbers first, so I downloaded SAT-TE 2007 and SAT-TE 2010 from the EUROPOL publications website, and lo and behold it turns out that whoever put these numbers together in such a disingenuous way deserves a visit from the special finish Father Christmas, for being a very naughty boy indeed. Here is the correct summary of the numbers found in the aforementioned reports:

Sources of Terror in Europe 2006-2009 according to EUROPOL:

Islamist: 4 (0,22%)
Seperatis: 1590 (87,65%)
Left-Wing: 144 (7,94%)
Right-Wing: 6 (0,33%)
Single-issue: 8 (0,44%)
Other/Not Specified: 62 (3,42%)
Total: 1814 (100%)
Feel free to double check my sources and calculations in this google documents spreadsheet.

Turns out that not only is the perpetrator incapable of summing numbers correctly, ie. the total number is 1814 not 1770, but more importantly the numbers for “Separatists” and “Right-Wing” have been merged into one, despite the fact that they are represented separately in both of the aforementioned reports.

Why would anyone misrepresent numbers like this? I mean if the double-dealer behind the first summary wanted to save one line of text, he could have merged the non specific “Single-Issue” and “Other/Not Specified”. Which would make a lot of sense, considering that the “Single-Issue” category is absent in the report covering 2006.

Maybe we can hint at a possible motive by looking at the numbers differently. The following table is based on the same numbers as the one above but disregards “Seperatist” terror:

Islamist: 4 (1,79%)
Left-Wing: 144 (64,29%)
Right-Wing: 6 (2,68%)
Single-issue: 8 (3,57%)
Other/Not Specified: 62 (27,68%)

Now look who’s dominating the european terror statistics! I’ll leave any guesswork regarding the delinquents political sympathies and antipathies as an exercise for the reader.

On a lighter note, it turns out that “Team Islam” is doing even better than originally reported, which makes you wonder, did our wannabe deceiver get his numbers from the same source that I did? But it also makes it 50% more infuriating that this idiot has muddled the numbers in order to serve his own agenda.

There is exactly one person on facebook with the name originally attributed to the summary and he’s from Sweden which matches the language of the original text, so I’m going to send him a link to this post, giving him a chance to point out any errors I’ve made in the process of making him look so statistically opportunistic and incompetent.

Or rather I’ll notify him as soon as I’ve checked my firewalls and installed Varnish in front of the webserver, just in case he’s the vindicative type and well enough connected to utilize tools like the Low Orbit Ion Cannon in a significant way. In which case I’ll have to move my server to somewhere under the Akamai umbrella anyway (as VISA and Mastercard recently learned the hard way).

But considering that I withheld his name in this text, he probably won’t bother. Which is fine by me as I don’t care about the motives of this small fry in particular, but I do find it worthwhile to try and expose this wrongful representation of numbers with a very interesting message. A lie that I assume is spreading through facebook statuses like a wildfire.

Also note that real politicians misrepresent numbers all the time in order to further their own positions, they are however in general a little bit better at it.

In closing, I’d like to add that Randal Munroe posted this strip on the same day that I found out about the above, so I guess yesterday wasn’t a total loss from a “honesty in number representation matters” point of view ;)