Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Counting the Dead

According to Kaleej Times, an English-language paper published in the United Arab Emirates,
Hamas interior minister Fathi Hammad told the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat that between 200 and 300 Hamas fighters were killed during the 22-day onslaught in addition to hundreds of civilians.
“They say the people suffered from this war, but is Hamas not part of the people? On the first day of the war Israel targeted police stations and 250 martyrs were killed, from Hamas and other factions,” he told the paper.
“In addition to them, between 200 and 300 fighters from the Al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas’s armed wing) and another 150 security forces were martyred.”
His numbers roughly match the 709 “terror operatives” the Israeli military said it had killed during the fighting, which included members of the Hamas-run police force that has patrolled Gaza since the group seized power in 2007. 
(h/t Norm).

CAMERA has gone back to read the sections of the Goldstone Report that discussed numbers of casualties. It won't be any surprise to learn that the Report, once again, positioned itself on the counter-factual side of the argument.
This is too old a story to appear in the media; still, those of you who comment on blogs are invited to cite this UEA report whenever the still oft-quoted false numbers of casualties are cited.

5 comments:

Barry Meislin said...

Yeah, sure, OK, sp they lied. Big deal. They're expected to lie. We expect them to lie. They expect themselves to lie (they wouldn't settle for anything less).

And the dude'll probably deny saying it tomorrow (or else claim he was "taken out of context").

BUT GAZA IS STILL UNDER SEIGE!

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001144.html

(P.S. How do you like my wacko-conspiracy-theorist font?)

Anonymous said...

welcome back Yaacov.

As for the 'admission' - it doesn't matter. The damage to us is already done.

Anonymous said...

Oh Great, 'Durban III' set for New York September 2011.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/durban-iii-set-new-york-city-september-2011_514526.html

Anonymous said...

There's not much use quoting Hamas on casualties, because the anti-Israel forces have adopted a new tactic. They quote Palestinian numbers for the overall killed followed by the number of children. Whether either of these numbers has anymore basis in fact than the original numbers of Hamas dead is never discussed. Nor is there a discussion of Hamas battle tactics.
http://www.northfieldnews.com/news.php?viewStory=55068
T34

Anonymous said...

Whenever dead children are mentioned in one of "my" comment threads I insist on their age getting defined.
To date all those challenged have chickened or rather slithered out. The reason for this I learned in a lecture by this man http://law.wlu.edu/faculty/profiledetail.asp?id=11
i.e. the age as of which a child soldier stops being a child and becomes a soldier is very much under dispute.

Slate.com told me that for Gazans the age limit is set at 18. From Mr. Drumbl I learned that the int'ls are debating it around 15.

Therefore beware whenever child casualties are mentioned unless the age isn't clearly defined suspicion of phony numbers is justified.

When I was young, working age in Germany began at 14!!! (1956 and onward) for those who hadn't landed an apprenticeship or hang on in school. (school began at 6 and ended in the 8 year Volksschule at 14. BTW pupils who had been good in German could become printer apprentices then. One of those was a member in our clique and the authority we "gymnasiasts" went to with spelling and interpunction problems. He was reliable. and all of us weren't children who could look back on trauma-free early childhoods. Amazing isn't it? are we living in an age of progressive childification? - I think "my" Greek fishermen friends had left school at 12 and started to work on their father's boat from then on. I don't know how old they were when they'd start work on big merchant ships but definitely a lot less than 18)

Silke