Blogging Never Changes Part Two - Truth and Credibility

 Here’s the next bite of elephant. Truth and Credibility 

The assertion by the Biden Administration that the Hamas run Health Ministry is lying - despite the fact that the thing the lie they were telling could easily be determined to be accurate. Despite the fact that the administration isn’t even challenging the number.  They weren’t even attempting to correct the count - they solely wanted to discredit it, even though they should have known the number was in the range they should have expected. Based solely on “we don’t like the people associated with the people who produce this number”.

Let me note here a very important point that has gotten lost. The "Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Authority" is a health authority. They are tasked with providing healthcare and medical services in the open air prison that is Gaza. These are not the Hamas fighters that crossed the border on the 7th to commit horrific atrocities. These are not makeshift rocket engineers creating ordnance to fire into the Iron Dome. These are doctors and other health care professionals. Serving a population under massive air bombardment and now ground invasion. They are doing it without a steady supply of electricity, medical supplies, or clean water. These are the people that Biden and his defenders are saying that you cannot believe because they are bad people.

Back to Truth and Credibility. The answer to uncertainty is transparency. You show your work so others can verify for themselves. Which the Health Ministry did immediately. They released the full list of the names and ID numbers of everyone they had verified as killed at that time. 

OTOH, how do the “good guys” behave when confronted on their claims? The Al Ahli hospital explosion I has been confirmed by the US and her allies as being exactly what the IDF told them it was - a misfiring Palestinian Islamic Jihad  rocket. And even though many news outlets are still reporting it as “inconclusive” - the US and Israel have rejected all calls for any independent investigation. The evidence provided are audio recordings which people have now acknowledged to be doctored and edited - and citations to videos used to geolocation the rocket launch. Those same videos were cited in the days immediately following the hospital attack as proof the PIJ rocket came from Israel. 

So it’s not conclusive? A “he said/she said” situation? Well again, you go for transparency. Here’s an example of what showing your work might look like in this case. Also too, note the other IDF lie disproven by the video the IDF cited to prove their innocence. IDF claims they weren’t bombing anywhere near there at the time - but we clearly see two explosions nearby the hospital prior to the PIJ rocket barrage being launched.  Or the lie that the IDF doesn’t target hospitals despite there being an IDF artillery shell in the hospital, which had hit it a mere three days before the disaster  

Which brings me to the point. Truth and Credibility. At any time there are a lot of things which are the Truth. I’m hungry. It’s not raining. The Gaza Strip is a dangerous place to be right now. Everyone has their own perspectives and priorities. Things which they see as the Truth may well be true to them. But just because they believe it, that doesn’t mean that we should believe it too. That’s the credibility part.

One tool we use to judge credibility is reputation - which is often based on observed historical behaviour. For example, the Gaza Health Ministry death count is deemed by non-warmongers to be credible in part because their historic death counts have been accurate. OTOH, the IDF’s claim that they weren’t responsible for some unpopular killing - well this is so bad that it should be considered a joke. 

The oft cited example of the IDF lying to avoid blame for killing is the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh. A Palestinian journalist shot dead a couple hundred metres away from where an IDF squad was stationed. The IDF blamed the killing on Hamas and released a video of Hamas fighters firing their rifles. Months later after the video was shown to be unrelated and irrelevant and media investigations showed that it was almost definitely the IDF squad that killed Abu Akleh, the IDF admitted that maybe that squad might have accidentally killed Shireen. Implying that the IDF had spent months denying responsibility despite the fact that their squad had fired their weapons at the same time the killing occurred. But it totally wasn’t intentional and still might have been Hamas’ fault in the coincidence of the century. 

Another example was when 5 children were killed by an exploding thing that fell from the sky on August 7, 2022. Israel was conducting air strikes at the time, but the IDF insisted that it wasn’t them because killing children was super unpopular back in 2022 (oh how times have changed).  Their explanation for what happened might sound familiar - they claimed it was a misfiring Palestinian Islamic Juhad rocket  Well, they did backtrack on those claims after a rights group said that they had found shrapnel with part of a serial number on it.

In short, the IDF lies. All the time. Shamelessly. And in regards to what they said about Al Ahli Hospital, literally the same excuse they had to retract  using the same type of video disinformation they have engaged in before  the IDF is currently claiming that the Al Quds hospital is actually a front for Hamas terror operations. OTOH, the hospital denies this as does the Norwegian doctor working there now. They have again provided zero evidence of this underground network of Hamas super terror. It's Bin Laden's Mountain Fortress all over again.

I bring all this up because something else has gotten my panties in a twist. It was a podcast - and the host, who I actually think has a lot of good takes - managed to piss me off beyond any reasonable proportion. He cited the fact that multiple governments like the US and Canada (it's a Canadian podcast) as well as many major media outlets like CNN and the Wash Post had determined that it was PIJ rocket misfire - and that still believing that Israel was responsible meant that you had to believe in some sort of global Zionist conspiracy.

WTF?

Here is the "global Zionist conspiracy" I believe in - all sorts of people, many in government and media - give the IDF far more credibility than it deserves. That's it. The whole conspiracy - the IDF lies about something and then friendly governments and media report it as fact. Despite knowing the IDF's history of lying, they do no back checking of their own because, well who are you going to believe the IDF or Hamas? It was especially galling as the podcast is a media criticism podcast that is acutely aware of how this dynamic plays out - for example when cops issue press releases straight on to media home pages.

Blogging. Blogging Never Changes.

I would say that I am just as surprised as you are that something is getting written here - but then I realize that there is no "you". No one is reading this, a defunct blog that never had much readership even before it went dark almost a decade ago. That said, I started here because I had shit burning a hole inside my head and raging about it in the comments sections elsewhere seemed rude. I post here so I don't end up yelling at people IRL. So here I am, yelling into the internet void again - and I guess it isn't surprising that I'm doing this again now.

So, like they say about eating a whole elephant - start off with one bite. That bite is going to be Biden's criticism of the Gaza Health Ministry death numbers from a few days ago. But be warned, there is a lot more of the elephant to come.

When prompted by a reporter asking about the death numbers from the "Hamas controlled Gaza Health Ministry" he said he had "no notion that the Palestinians were telling the truth about how many people were killed". A t the time, the Health Ministry had said that it was over 6,500 - nearly half of whom were children

There was pushback on this, he was called out for trying to minimize the death and destruction being handed out by Israel. To those of us who view what Israel is doing right now as active and undeniable genocide, we had the president of the United States engaging in genocide denialism. Much of the response the handful of not completely-in-the-tank-for-ethnic-cleansing media outlets pushed was about how everybody - NGOs, the US government, the UN, doctors working in Gaza - everybody had faith in the numbers. That numbers reported historically have proven to be quite accurate. They have pointed at the videos and images of destruction already widely circulated, the piles of bodies, the accounts of people on the ground.

I'm pretty sure the few people who might find their way to this post don't need convincing, but again - the point is to get this out of my head. The question is how does one go about verifying a number like this? Well the Health Ministry's approach was to provide the names. A 212 page long list of the names and ID numbers of the 7,000 people the Health Ministry had verified. That seems pretty conclusive. My verification at the time was to cross-check against the UNRWA death numbers.  There are "over 10,000 in the Gaza Field Office" serving over 2 million Gazans. Roughly one UNRWA worker for every 200 Gazans.  At the time, the UNRWA had reported 35 of its number had been killed - which implies a death toll of 7,000 Gazans. The number reported by the Health Ministry was exactly the number that we would have expected if Israel was making no effort to avoid bombing UN facilities. But Israel is avoiding attacks on UN buildings - which means the Gaza Health Ministry number is obviously an undercount - which makes sense, the Gaza Strip is under constant bombardment. Of course there are people killed that have not been catalogued yet, like the hundreds that are trapped beneath the rubble.

This was an easy analysis that took almost no time at all. The numbers are primary sourced from publicly accessible UN sources. It should have been clearly and plainly obvious to anyone giving it a moment's thought that the number was in the right range, that it was credible - even without knowing that this number has historically been credible. But Biden said it anyways in a presser. Was he shooting off the cuff? Talking about shit he had no clue about? That seems bad - but the alternatives are worse. One alternative is that he doesn't know and no one else knew that the number was believable because no one advising the president gives a shit. Literally zero people with any concern about the Palestinian death toll. That seems a lot worse - but the other alternative is worse than that.  The other possibility is that they knew - that they actually have their own estimate of the numbers killed by Israeli airstrikes and they know that the official Health Ministry number is a serious undercount - but they did this anyways. That this genocide denialism is intentional.

There's been no apology yet. Despite demands from Muslim groups which apparently the White House is supposed to be doing outreach on. They are just ignoring it and moving on. Sadly, this makes sense - because the rate of killing is going to escalate.  6,500 killed in 18 days. 1.500 in the three days since. And that number is a greater undercount because they lost all communications for a big chunk of time in there. It is getting worse, and will continue to do so. And we have been promised a “long and difficult war”. Yesterday, the UNRWA reported its number of lost colleagues at 53. So the number of Gazans killed so far in this "operation" is almost certainly above 10,000.