“Gaza reports more than 11,100 killed. That’s one out of every 200 people,” screamed a Washington Post headline yesterday. Today, the featured propaganda piece is “In Gaza, the dead go uncounted as medical infrastructure disintegrates.”
It is obvious that the Post has thrown in with the war crimes/genocide/ innocent civilians/humanitarian crisis that Hamas was counting on to make Israel the villain in an episode where reality is exactly the opposite, and the ethics are remarkably clear. The lessons, which Israel is now determined to teach Hamas, its sadly brain-washed Palestinian supporters, and others is this: Don’t start wars. If you do, you have no standing to complain about what happens to you. When you find that what is happening is unsustainable and intolerable, surrender, and accept the consequences of your actions.
Another lesson that the “Imagine” crowd, the best of the propagandists, and the anti-Semitic crowd, the worst of them also need to understand is that objective in any war is, or should be, to end it as quickly as possible. Regardless of what some toothless international body might claim, the way one ends wars quickly is to make them as costly and painful as possible as quickly as possible.
That’s what Israel is doing. Good.
Those killed in the counter attack to Hamas’s terror ambush “include doctors, journalists, professors and poets,” says the Post in that first story. “More than 11,100 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. While there is no breakdown between fighters and civilians, most of the dead are women and children. In just a little over a month of war, that amounts to over 0.5 percent of Gaza’s more than 2 million people.”
Wow, that’s horrible. I guess putting terrorists in charge of your government, especially when the want to maximize civilian casualties to manipulate world opinion, isn’t such a great idea after all. There is hope, however: the U.S. mainstream media has many players working hard to make the issue one that is defined by pure emotion: Think of the children!
Israel is thinking of the children: the children its enemies wants to kill.
When the Allies were engaging in tactics like carpet-bombing Berlin and fire-bombing Dresden, I wonder how often American reporters filed “poor Germany” stories with a tone like the Post reports we are seeing now (all by the same trio of reporters, Ruby Mellen, Artur Galocha and Júlia Ledur.) I’m not aware of any. It was the Germans and Japanese, who started World War II, that faced international war crimes trials after they were defeated, not Harry Truman, who dropped two atom bombs. I don’t recall reading about high level calls and protests demanding that “humanitarian aid” be sent to the combatant nations who started the war either. Somehow, such clarity has been lost in the intervening years.
In fact, this calls for an appearance from Major Clipton…
How did the basic concepts of the right to national defense, war, and deterrence leave the metaphorical building? Part of the problem is ethics and reality-challenged idealists like the author of this mind-blowing piece from Just Security, an organization dedicated to promoting principled and pragmatic solutions to problems confronting decision-makers in the United States and abroad. ” It’s topic is the progress of the International Law Commission’s (ILC) Draft Articles for a proposed crimes against humanity treaty. Naturally, Israel’s response to the Hamas attack would surely qualify under the proposed document as a “crime against humanity.” International law is a cynical joke, used by powerful nations to signal virtue and by less powerful nations to claim more power than they can be trusted with. This supposedly justice-minded organization shows its true colors with these sentence : “The 2023 session in October was, as one would expect, roiled by world events. Rights of reply were exercised by India and Pakistan; Armenia and Azerbaijan; and by Israel and the State of Palestine. Each was a reminder of how important the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity are in a world increasingly plagued by violence and human rights violations.” What “State of Palestine”? Whose “crimes against humanity”?
Israel doesn’t trust the international community, since the same pathogen of anti-Semitism has been reflected in its words and conduct for decades. It cannot afford to trust it, and having supposedly respectable media sources like the Post undermining their position presents one more obstacle to the nation’s survival.
Ethics Alarms 
Jack asked, “Why Is The Washington Post Publishing All These “Poor Gaza!” Hamas Propaganda Stories?”
The answer is very clear to me and it’s the same across most of the left leaning main stream media complex, A Biased Narrative Is Being Built.
I smell an anti-Semitic propaganda rat emanating from our Pravda-USA media.
Well, the Washington Post has long been an outlet for the intelligence agencies. This suggest the intelligence infrastructure sympathizes with Hamas. This shouldn’t be shocking considering the State Department ‘petition’.
As for their complaints about ‘doctors, journalists, professors and poets”, Mahmoud al-Zahar, one of the founders of Hamas, is a surgeon, think about all the journalists who have warped the minds of the Palestinians and the left in general, think about the college professors who embedded all the racial hatred we see across the campuses today, and think about the poets who come up with “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. Since these groups are ones who have caused the problem, why is it that we should be immune for the consequences?
You don’t mean to imply that when left-wing college educated professionals take the reigns of government, people’s lives get worse?
Can’t say I disagree.
Oh, its worse than that. Even if we leave the left-wing penchant for genocide, corruption, and elitism out of this, their ability to get things done is horrifying.
Let’s just say that I have enough experience to know that lots of ‘experts’ don’t actually know how to do anything or understand how anything actually works. Even if they are grounded in sound theory (and that is a big ‘if’), they don’t understand how things actually happen.
California is trying to go to flat-fee electric pricing. If you family income is under $60,000/year, you pay $34/month. If your family income is under $180,000/year, you pay $70/month. And if your family income is over $180,000/year, you pay $120/month. Now, with California’s electric prices, this is a steal. The leftist experts are all envisioning a wonderful, socialist utopia. What will happen is:
(1) The prices will go from $34/$70/$120 to $300/$800/$1500 in months after this passes. There is no other way to pay for California’s inefficiency.
(2) With flat pricing (the bill doesn’t depend on how much you use), vast amounts of electricity will be used. This will result in brownouts and rationing.
(3) Since people with solar panels have to pay the same as people without, those panels are going to be sold on ebay. This will drive up demand and reduce supply even more.
In another example, our city council once voted down a proposal to test a 20-year old water system to the backup reservoir 10-1 because since it hadn’t been used, it was brand new! All those doctors and teachers and lawyers laughed at the retired electrician who wanted to test a ‘brand new’ water system so we could repair it (if necessary) before we really needed it.
Yoikes!!! Do you have a link for that, MR?
PWS
Ok, the first article I saw said it was just a flat fee. This one
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-04-11/a-fixed-monthly-charge-is-coming-to-your-electric-bill-will-it-make-caifornia-rates-more-affordable
suggests it is a flat fee + more. It still isn’t clear from the articles what is going on. The one above has the best explanation I can find. I am shocked that they are paying $0.47/kWh. I pay $0.08/kWh.
North Carolina, Duke Energy. It looks like we pay roughly 0.12/kWh, with a total bill (annualized) of about $155, including taxes and about $11 for a surge protector.
I think we’d fall into the $70 per month California category, which would be ridiculous.
So let’s do some California math: If their current rate is over four times the rate here, they believe that they can charge half my cost and pay for the services?
No wonder no one is able to test at grade level in the math tests in school.
There’s also exactly zero reasons to even believe the “11,000 dead” claim at all.
Right. The key words that go unchallenged in all these articles are: “according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.” There’s never a standard disclaimer along the lines of “these numbers have not been confirmed by any neutral observers.” This is the equivalent of trusting statistics issued by the Soviets or the CCP or the Maduro “government.” These “journalists” are just so damned brazen. They trust Hamas but not Israel. Ridiculous.
And of course, everyone working at the Washington Post is a graduate of a liberal arts college or university and journalism school within the last twenty years. They’re completely “woke” and all in on deconstruction and decolonization and decarceration and all the other de’s
At the end of the day, the 11,000 claim is probably a flat out lie. But let’s go ahead and pretend it’s more like 6,000. No small number. That number will break down along these lines:
1) People who were going to die anyway even if there wasn’t a war – the elderly, the terminally ill, etc – you know the kind of numbers used to pad the dreaded Covid statistics.
Now, I’m sure this number isn’t a large component of the 6,000 hypothetical, but Hamas is still using it to inflate the number of dead Palestinians – like the Covid totalitarian Left did with naturally expected deaths.
2) People who were actually directly murdered by Hamas. Ample reports have trickled out of the warzone now that Hamas “police” have been shooting civilian Palestinians who have tried to evacuate south beyond the Wadi al Gaza (which is what Israel advised them to do) and reports of shooting civilian Palestinians trying to get away from areas they were being used as shields in.
All of these heinous deaths, 100% on Hamas.
Again, this in an unknown number, but there is no way it’s small.
3) Palestinians who were actually killed by Israeli forces. This breaks down into two sub-groups –
3a) Hamas militants. A very large number of the total dead. And so what?
3b) Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli forces. This number, an unknown number, but a smaller number than the actual total which is a smaller number than the reported total, is certainly unfortunate. But guess what? Their deaths? Let’s see:
3b1) There are those who will have unfortunately been in the wrong place at the wrong time and represented a justifiable but unfortunate loss in pursuit of a military target. This is sad, their deaths are 100% on the guys who started the war: Hamas.
3b2) There are those who will have been heinously shoved in the way of Israeli bullets to protect Hamas targets and serve propaganda purposes of Hamas. Their deaths are 100% on Hamas.
3b3) There will be those who will have died in pursuit of a justifiable military target, but maybe, just maybe, were part of a larger group of civilians in which the collateral losses aren’t justifiable, in which case, maybe, this tiny sliver of a fraction of Palestinian losses would be because of Israeli miscalculation.
But that number? Probably less than 100. I see a lot of people crowing that the 50 civilian dead in the camp protecting the Hamas commander falls in the category of unjustifiable. I’m not certain – could still be quite justifiable, I don’t have the data Israel was operating with. Combined with the likelihood that the 50 number isn’t even accurate.
But because of the presence of the small sliver of people constituting group 3b3 – the entire Left Wing Propaganda Machine will wholeheartedly cast side-eye at the Israeli war effort. Never mind that in war, 3b3 will never be perfectly avoided.
Here is how you lie with numbers:
From the article:
“As of 3 November, according to Ministry of Health data, 2326 women and 3760 children have been killed in the Gaza strip, representing 67% of all casualties….”
6086 women and children dead; 67% of all casualties.
That means that 33% are what? Men.
And, if 6086 is 67% of the total, 33% would be 2,997. (You can check my math; I just did not want to show my work.). 2,997 men. More than 600 more men died than women.
But, what is the conclusion Jack took away (because they told him to):
“While there is no breakdown between fighters and civilians, most of the dead are women and children.”
It would be more fair to say that most of the dead are men and children.
But, assuming boys and girls (the children) were killed more evenly than men and women, one could say more males were killed than were females, a conclusion that would not shock anyone.
(By the way, I think it is fair to assume that boys and girls die in roughly equal numbers, generally, unless there is a reason to explain otherwise (e.g. boys recruited to fight, or girls left more exposed because they are less valued.)
And the forgoing may help illustrate how my responses to partisan memes lost me a number of friends on Facebook.
The lie is sitting right there. I just wonder if the liars even know they are being deceptive.
-Jut
Jack, thank you for your postings about Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinians. And for your moral clarity. You have helped me cope with dread I really haven’t felt since the 1972 Munich Olympics all those years ago.
One thing that has bugged me for decades about Israeli policy: why the hell does Israel not have better pr? Surely it’s not for
lack of talent. Israeli friends say it’s the Israeli way not to give a crap what “Western intelligentsia” thinks. Which I get, but it makes following the “news” all the more depressing. Thank god for your blog, the WSJ, and The Times of Israel, and Bari Weiss. Even the Israeli leftie English-language paper, Haaretz, has surprised me, pleasantly. But as to the WaPo, NYT, etc.: other than some of their op-ed writers: their newsrooms and edit boards have been corrupted with the anti-Israel, “colonizer” narrative: pernicious mishegoss/narrischkeit.