The past 22 months have seen Israel engaged in a devastating military operation in Gaza. That has inevitably meant civilian casualties.
As of now, we do not know the exact number, not least because the figures are provided by the Hamas-run ministry of health and, at the most basic level, do not separate out terrorists from civilians.
But it is striking how few supposedly objective observers not only take the word of Hamas as gospel, but are willing to peddle any supposed statistic or revelation which paints Israelis as bloodthirsty monsters.
This week has seen one such claim go viral on social media – a claim so obviously preposterous that it calls into question not just the bias of those who are citing it but their very ability to engage in cognitive reasoning.
On Monday the IDF killed Anas al-Sharif, who was employed as a journalist by Al Jazeera but who was also, according to the Israelis, the commander of a rocket launch squadron in Hamas’s Northern Brigade, had a personal Hamas ID number and had his details listed in the directory of Hamas’s Nukhba battalion in East Jabaliya.
His killing prompted a mass outbreak of anger among many leading journalists. It also led to the circulation by some of those journalists of a statistic that anyone with even a modicum of basic sense could see was plain nonsense.
John Simpson, doyen of BBC correspondents and its world affairs editor, was among the first to respond to al-Sharif’s death by circulating the “statistic”, posting this on his social media feed: “According to the Watson School of International and Public Affairs in Rhode Island, more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in both world wars, the Vietnam war, the wars in Yugoslavia and the war in Afghanistan combined.” Sky’s Alex Crawford had already posted the claim in June, when it was first made.
It will surprise no one that Amnesty, which often publishes grotesque lies about Israel, also joined in, citing figures from the report: “The targeted killing of Anas al-Sharif and five other journalists on Sunday means at least 242 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of October 2023. No conflict in modern history has seen a higher number of journalists killed. Second World War: 1939-45: 69 journalists killed.”
These claims are absurd for the patently obvious reason that, under the Third Reich, there was the Holocaust: a glance at the Yad Vashem website shows that more than 1400 Jewish journalists were murdered by the Nazis. So even restricting the numbers killed to just Jewish journalists, the claim by the Watson School – gobbled up with glee by the likes of Simpson, Crawford and Amnesty International – is clearly nonsense, since the number of Jewish journalists killed during WW2 is more than five times the entire number of reporters supposedly killed in Gaza.
But it gets worse. The Watson School claims that just 69 journalists died in WW2. The claim is self-evident nonsense, given that it’s estimated that between 70 and 85 million people died in WW2. The paper’s authors appear to have taken a memorial to journalists killed doing their job built by the Freedom Forum in the US, which lists 69 reporters who died during WW2, and taken these to be not some of the reporters who died in WW2 but the only reporters. It is jaw dropping in its stupidity – assuming, perhaps charitably, idiocy rather than malevolence.
The Watson scholars have, however, done the opposite with their estimation of the number of journalists killed in Gaza: they have probably produced an exaggerated number.
Analysis of the names cited by those less willing to accept without scrutiny any claim of Israeli evil shows that some are considered by the Watson authors to be journalists for the most tenuous of reasons – such as having an Instagram or Facebook account to which they have posted content.
Many mainstream and renowned journalists have emerged from the Gaza conflict with their reputations shown to be undeserved; the same is true of some NGOs. This latest example is perhaps the most astonishing example of all of their willingness to uncritically repeat any nonsense, so long as it portrays Israel as the villain.
The past 22 months have seen Israel engaged in a devastating military operation in Gaza. That has inevitably meant civilian casualties.
As of now, we do not know the exact number, not least because the figures are provided by the Hamas-run ministry of health and, at the most basic level, do not separate out terrorists from civilians.
But it is striking how few supposedly objective observers not only take the word of Hamas as gospel, but are willing to peddle any supposed statistic or revelation which paints Israelis as bloodthirsty monsters.
This week has seen one such claim go viral on social media – a claim so obviously preposterous that it calls into question not just the bias of those who are citing it but their very ability to engage in cognitive reasoning.
On Monday the IDF killed Anas al-Sharif, who was employed as a journalist by Al Jazeera but who was also, according to the Israelis, the commander of a rocket launch squadron in Hamas’s Northern Brigade, had a personal Hamas ID number and had his details listed in the directory of Hamas’s Nukhba battalion in East Jabaliya.
His killing prompted a mass outbreak of anger among many leading journalists. It also led to the circulation by some of those journalists of a statistic that anyone with even a modicum of basic sense could see was plain nonsense.
John Simpson, doyen of BBC correspondents and its world affairs editor, was among the first to respond to al-Sharif’s death by circulating the “statistic”, posting this on his social media feed: “According to the Watson School of International and Public Affairs in Rhode Island, more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in both world wars, the Vietnam war, the wars in Yugoslavia and the war in Afghanistan combined.” Sky’s Alex Crawford had already posted the claim in June, when it was first made.
It will surprise no one that Amnesty, which often publishes grotesque lies about Israel, also joined in, citing figures from the report: “The targeted killing of Anas al-Sharif and five other journalists on Sunday means at least 242 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of October 2023. No conflict in modern history has seen a higher number of journalists killed. Second World War: 1939-45: 69 journalists killed.”
These claims are absurd for the patently obvious reason that, under the Third Reich, there was the Holocaust: a glance at the Yad Vashem website shows that more than 1400 Jewish journalists were murdered by the Nazis. So even restricting the numbers killed to just Jewish journalists, the claim by the Watson School – gobbled up with glee by the likes of Simpson, Crawford and Amnesty International – is clearly nonsense, since the number of Jewish journalists killed during WW2 is more than five times the entire number of reporters supposedly killed in Gaza.
But it gets worse. The Watson School claims that just 69 journalists died in WW2. The claim is self-evident nonsense, given that it’s estimated that between 70 and 85 million people died in WW2. The paper’s authors appear to have taken a memorial to journalists killed doing their job built by the Freedom Forum in the US, which lists 69 reporters who died during WW2, and taken these to be not some of the reporters who died in WW2 but the only reporters. It is jaw dropping in its stupidity – assuming, perhaps charitably, idiocy rather than malevolence.
The Watson scholars have, however, done the opposite with their estimation of the number of journalists killed in Gaza: they have probably produced an exaggerated number.
Analysis of the names cited by those less willing to accept without scrutiny any claim of Israeli evil shows that some are considered by the Watson authors to be journalists for the most tenuous of reasons – such as having an Instagram or Facebook account to which they have posted content.
Many mainstream and renowned journalists have emerged from the Gaza conflict with their reputations shown to be undeserved; the same is true of some NGOs. This latest example is perhaps the most astonishing example of all of their willingness to uncritically repeat any nonsense, so long as it portrays Israel as the villain.