When you say: "Look, the people from village A north are stealing apples from the city orchard. Here is a list of apple thieves and the direction (N,E,S,W) from which they came." And this list shows that it appears to be majorly the directions E,S,W (so not directly from village A). Then how is this an argument?

It just shows that everybody steals apples, making the accusation "villagers of A are to blame" superficial. That's the point it tried to make.

> But there are also other reasons your conclusion is wrong I think

I would be interested on why my conclusion is wrong. At best, one could draw nothing from the data as it does not show any relation to state actors. And if this conclusion is drawn, then why did `mike_d` blame the western state actors in the first place?

Think for a second about this: Did you think that the link `mike_d` provided supported the argument "... feed the data to western governments" with the emphasis on 'western'?