We heard earlier in the week that Hamas had removed thousands of deaths from its Gaza casualty figures – a good proportion of them children. Brendan O'Neill in the Spectator:
Are we being lied to, or at the very least misled, about what’s going on in Gaza? It increasingly seems so. Israel is carrying out a genocide, cries the activist class. Its pummelling of Gaza is one of the most barbarous onslaughts against civilians in history, they say. New research suggests these feverish claims have no basis in truth. What Israel’s voluble haters call ‘mass murder’ is in fact a pretty normal war….
It is the demographics of the death count from Gaza that are most telling. Studies – unbiased ones, that is – suggest that up to 72 per cent of the fatalities aged 13 to 55 are men. This backs up Israel’s claim that it is targeting fighting-age males (Hamas deploys even very young males to carry out its terror). The West’s noisy Israelophobes frequently say that as many as two-thirds of the dead in Gaza are women and children. There’s no evidence for this. It’s a defamation masquerading as a statistic.
No sane person denies that the war in Gaza has caused enormous suffering, including for civilians. It is a moral outrage that Hamas brought this tragedy onto the Palestinian people with its fascistic assault on Israel on 7 October 2023. Yet the story we so often hear about Israel’s war – that it is uniquely murderous, a genocide, a bloodlusting assault on women and children – is just not true. It is heavy on hysteria and light indeed on facts.
We’ve now had a year-and-a-half of the most unhinged animus for Israel. On our streets, on our campuses and most unforgivably in our press, the cry has gone out: Israel is one of the most murderous nations in history. One can’t help but hear the echo of old, dark bigotries in this curious loathing for Israel. The idea that the Jewish nation is inherently genocidal, that it targets children for ‘bloodletting’, resuscitates the medieval calumny that treated the Jews as a child-sacrificing race.
When the fog of war clears, we’ll need a reckoning with how the activist class and the media talked about this conflict. Why they so rarely mentioned the deaths of Hamas militants. Why they depicted a war on an army of anti-Semites as a slaughter of civilians. Why they engaged in the shameful moral inversion of calling Israel’s fightback against genocidal terrorists a ‘genocide’. Too many have made themselves the Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas, foolishly spreading its lies about the war and its libels against the Jewish state.
The BBC still reports every communication on casualties from Hamas as front page news.
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