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The Truth About Casualties: Comparing Gaza to the Iraq War
An Israeli police officer stands next to the remains of a rocket after rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Palestinian Islamist terrorist group Hamas, in Herzliya, Israel May 26 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Nir Elias
Last December, The Wall Street Journal contrasted the number of munitions dropped in the Gaza war with numbers from the US war in Iraq. In the roughly two months that had elapsed since the Oct. 7 massacre, Israel dropped 29,000 weapons in Gaza, the Journal explained, whereas the US military dropped just 3,678 munitions on Iraq from 2004 to 2010. The clear takeaway was that Israel was uniquely trigger-happy.
If history started in 2004, those statistics might faithfully tell the story. But the invasion of Iraq began — and ended — in 2003. That was the year Iraq’s cities fell to US forces, the year the regime was overthrown, and the year Saddam Hussein was captured.
If the Journal were interested in comparing what is comparable, readers would have learned that while Israel dropped 29,000 weapons in two months in 2023, the US in 2003 dropped that same number in half that time.
This example is one of many media manipulations, which have bent and stretched statistics from the Iraq war and others. And it has frequently been on the basis of such tampered evidence that the media has argued Israel’s fight against Hamas dramatically stands out compared to other wars throughout history.
To help make its case that the Gaza war “is different,” for example, The New York Times contrasted casualties over two months of fighting in Gaza to “the entire first year of the invasion of Iraq.”
In fact, the 2003 invasion lasted about one month, during which most of the Iraqi casualties mentioned by the newspaper were killed. (Never mind that in the Gaza war, the Times has also relied on undependable Hamas casualty breakdowns.)
If the Iraq comparison is important enough to cover, then it’s important enough to cover without downplaying the casualty rate in Iraq.
So let’s look at what The New York Times conceals. How different was Gaza than Iraq, really?
Over the 22 days from March 19, 2003, when invasion of Iraq began, and April 9, when the Saddam Hussein regime is understood to have collapsed, the US invasion led to the death of civilians at a higher rate than the best, albeit rough, estimates over that same time span in Gaza.
Our graph plots the number of Iraqi civilian deaths that have been verified by Iraq Body Count alongside estimates based on Hamas figures for total deaths in Gaza. (Hamas updates hide the number of combatants killed.)
We call our highest estimate of civilian casualties the “Hamas extrapolation,” since it takes Hamas’s overall numbers and assumes 80 percent of them are civilians, as a Hamas official cited by Reuters once charged.
Our lowest estimate, the “Israel extrapolation,” assumes 60 percent of Hamas’s stated casualties are civilians, in line with Israeli estimates (but ignoring a lower estimate used by Benjamin Netanyahu). The “Egypt extrapolation” in the middle assumes 70 percent of the deaths were civilians, in line with a projection by Egyptian intelligence officials who said the number falls between the belligerents’ estimates.
And what about the numbers after the first 22 days of fighting in Iraq and Gaza?
For the remainder of the year, the rate of deaths in Iraq fell to a trickle, as might be expected after the fall of the regime. In Gaza, fighting raged on, so the casualty totals quickly surpassed those in Iraq.
Still, the casualty rate in Gaza steadily declined, a fact that seems to have been lost in the media’s coverage of the fighting. The graph below, which also relies on Hamas’ casualty totals, shows how every month that has passed, the rate of casualties fell further below the rate during the invasion of Iraq.
This continuous decline in casualties as Hamas lost ground in Gaza is unsurprising, since Israel’s stated objective is to beat back Hamas and end its control over the territory.
Those who insist Israel’s intent is to destroy the Palestinian people — in other words, those throwing around the “genocide” slur — might have a harder time explaining the decline.
To note that the rates of munitions and casualties during the fight to unseat the Iraqi regime exceeded the rates in Gaza serves as a corrective to media misrepresentations. It doesn’t diminish the real suffering in Gaza, any more than a tallying of Hamas and Hezbollah rockets diminishes the hardship of thousands of Israeli families forced from their homes by those rockets, or the pain of Israelis whose children were murdered or kidnapped during Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.
If war is hell, then urban war merits a worse description. In Gaza, we have an urban war in which Hamas terrorists dig themselves under the densely packed civilians they rule, a literal inversion of the humane arrangement.
If civilian casualties mean so little to Hamas, of course it refuses to surrender itself and its hostages. And in light of Hamas’s promises to repeat the Oct. 7 slaughter again and again, Israel’s obligation to its citizens is to do everything it reasonably can, politically and certainly militarily, to eliminate the threat.
To understand how the Gaza war is different, the press should start there — and stop manipulating the numbers.
Gilead Ini is a Senior Research Analyst at CAMERA, the foremost media watchdog organization focused on coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The post The Truth About Casualties: Comparing Gaza to the Iraq War first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Vancouver police raid a home linked to the director of Samidoun—which is now a terrorist entity in Canada
Vancouver police arrested and released one person at the home of Charlotte Kates, director of the terror group Samidoun, in a dramatic raid on Nov. 14. The raid was conducted […]
The post Vancouver police raid a home linked to the director of Samidoun—which is now a terrorist entity in Canada appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Trump Won A Majority of Votes In Heavily-Jewish New York City Precincts, Election Data Claims
Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Forum River Center in Rome, Georgia, US, March 9, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Alyssa Pointer
President-elect Donald Trump won an overwhelming majority of the votes in New York City (NYC) precincts that were at least a quarter Jewish, according to a data analysis by the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), a prominent Washington DC-based political group.
RJC presented data on Friday affirming the notion that Trump won a higher proportion of the NYC Jewish vote than in previous elections, potentially signaling an ideological shift in the traditionally-liberal voting bloc. According to RJC data, Trump received the “overwhelming” majority of votes in precincts with a Jewish population of at least 25%.
Trump’s 2024 performance among Jews in NYC seems to mark a substantial improvement over the 2020 and 2016 elections, contests in which the president-elect struggled to make inroads among Jewish voters.
Voting data from the 2024 election also indicate that there was a significant shift among Jewish voters in Pennsylvania. President-elect Trump also enjoyed greater success in heavily-Jewish enclaves of deep-blue cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles, according to data compiled by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners and the Los Angeles Times, respectively.
Trump’s increased success among Jewish voters in the Big Apple comes amid simmering anger over surging antisemitism across the country.
In the year following the Hamas slaughter of roughly 1200 people throughout southern Israel, college campuses have become embroiled in an unrelenting onslaught of protests opposing the Jewish state. Moreover, many Jews have expressed dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, suggesting that the president has not been a firm ally of the Jewish state.
Over the past year, NYC has been ravaged with raucous, often-violent anti-Israel demonstrations and an unrelenting spate of antisemitic hate crimes.
Columbia University, one of the most prestigious higher education institutions in the world, became a poster-child for the anti-Israel campus movement, erecting encampments and holding protests calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Many NYC public schools came embroiled in scandal after teachers presented students with lesson plans that accused Israel of committing “apartheid” and “genocide” against the Palestinians.
Though most national Democrats continue to express support for Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas terrorists, some figures in the party have, over the past year, adopted a more adversarial posture toward the Jewish state, often citing the humanitarian situation in Gaza as a key reason.
High-profile Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA) have suggested that Israel has perpetrated a “genocide” against Palestinians in Hamas-ruled Gaza, where Israel has been waging a military campaign targeting terrorists since the Oct. 7 atrocities. Earlier this year, a group of dozens of Democratic lawmakers, including former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), sent a letter to US President Joe Biden, urging him to “reconsider” approving offensive arms shipments to Israel.
Over the course of his campaign, Trump repeatedly touted his support for the Jewish state during his singular term in office. While courting Jewish voters, Trump has boasted about his administration’s work in fostering the Abraham Accords, promising to resume efforts to strengthen them once he retains office in January.
Trump also recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a strategic region on Israel’s northern border previously controlled by Syria, and also moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, recognizing the city as the Jewish state’s capital.
The post Trump Won A Majority of Votes In Heavily-Jewish New York City Precincts, Election Data Claims first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Attempted Robbery of Jewish Man in Brooklyn Puts Orthodox Community on Edge
Screenshot of masked men who attempted to rob Jewish man in Crown Heights, Brooklyn on Thursday. Photo: Screenshot
The Jewish community in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York was the target of another attack on Thursday evening, as three men attempted to rob a Hasidic man after stalking him through the neighborhood.
Footage of the incident was shared on X/Twitter by Yaacov Behrman, liaison of Chabad Headquarters and founder of the Jewish Future Alliance (JFA) nonprofit. It shows the men, whose faces were concealed by hoods and ski masks, chasing the man into the street and through the neighborhood after attempting to accost him.
No arrests have been made.
“He doesn’t give in easily, and I don’t think they got anything,” Behrman tweeted. “The Jewish Future Alliance is deeply concerned not only about the increase in crime but also the fact that, once again, the perpetrators were wearing masks. We need to reinstate mask laws.”
The explosion of an antisemitic hate crime spree in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn has set the Orthodox Jewish community on edge in recent weeks.
Last Tuesday, two men beat a middle-aged Hasidic man after he refused to surrender his cell phone in compliance with what appears to have been an attempted robbery. According to multiple accounts, the assailants were two Black teenagers.
That incident was the third time in eight days that an Orthodox resident of Crown Heights was targeted for violence and humiliation. Before then, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily neighborhood, which is heavily Jewish, and less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face.
Most recently, a masked man was caught on video approaching a visibly Jewish father walking with his two sons and grabbing one of the children in broad daylight. He was unable to secure possession of the child, whose father fought back immediately and did not let go of his son. Police later identified the man as Stephan Stowe, 28 — a suspect gang member with an extensive criminal history which includes 33 prior arrests — and charged arrested him attempted kidnapping and endangering the welfare of a child.
In each case, the suspect was allegedly a Black male, a pattern of conduct which continues to strain Black-Jewish relations across the Five Boroughs.
Black-on-Jewish crime is a social issue which has been studied before. In 2022, a report published by Americans Against Antisemitism (AAA) showed that Orthodox Jews were the minority group most victimized by hate crimes in New York City and that 69 percent of their assailants were African American. Seventy-seven percent of the incidents took place taking in predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Of all assaults that prompted criminal proceedings, just two resulted in convictions.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” AAA founder and former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D) told The Algemeiner. “Shouldn’t there be a plan for how we’re going to deal with it? What’s the answer? Education? We’ve been educating everybody forever for God’s sake, and things are just getting worse.”
The problem has become acute in recent years. In July 2023, for example, a 22-year-old Israeli Yeshiva student, who was identifiably Orthodox and visiting New York City for the summer holiday, was stabbed with a screwdriver by one of two men who attacked him after asking whether he was Jewish and had any money. The other punched him in the face. Earlier that year, 10- and 12-year-olds were attacked on Albany Avenue by four African American teens.
According to a report issued in August by New York state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, antisemitic incidents accounted for a striking 65 percent of all felony hate crimes in New York City last year. The report added that throughout the state, nearly 44 percent of all recorded hate crime incidents and 88 percent of religious-based hate crimes targeted Jewish victims.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Attempted Robbery of Jewish Man in Brooklyn Puts Orthodox Community on Edge first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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