There is more than one way of gaining widespread acceptance for lying propaganda. Everyone has become superficially familiar with the concept of the Big Lie that is rammed into people’s heads over and over again, through every type of media available, until vast numbers come to believe it. That’s the usual Trump-MAGA technique, which has succeeded in getting tens of millions of Americans to believe that:
- A shadowy governmental conspiracy known as the “Deep State,” a terminology stolen from Turkish strongman Erdogan, “rigs” America’s electoral system, causing Trump to lose the popular vote in 2016 and both the popular and electoral votes in 2020.
- Unauthorized immigration over the border between the U.S. and Mexico is the greatest threat to American national security, with Latino immigrants responsible for violent crime, “poisoning the blood of our country,” and trying to “replace” the White American majority at the behest of the Deep State and George Soros.
- Gay and trans people pose an enormous threat of sexual assault against children, and Deep State types are also out to rape children.
Et cetera. The majority of the American people has been against Trump all along, and prides itself on not falling for his con artistry like all those stupid MAGA people. But basic logic would tell us that in a society so sick that close to half its people lap up the promises of an obvious sociopath, mountebank, crook, and would-be tyrant, much of the remainder will also be vulnerable to a somewhat different set of lies. This is exactly what we have seen in the storm of Jew hatred “progressives” have let loose ever since the October 7 orgy of mass rape and slaughter that the Islamist terrorist group Hamas committed.
The ignorance, gullibility, and hateful prejudice widespread among those who believe themselves to be “on the right side of history” make them easy targets for Hamas propaganda, such as the enthusiastic adoption of the genocidal slogan calling for Jews to be expelled “from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.” So, it is unsurprising that they would swallow uncritically every anti-Israel and anti-Jewish lie, such as the updated blood libel about Israel stealing organs out of Palestinians’ bodies, when in fact Israeli hospitals routinely provide medical care to Palestinians, including curing the now-supremo of Hamas in the Gaza Strip of his brain cancer.
What is surprising is that another significant piece of Hamas propaganda has received almost completely uncritical acceptance from people who are neither “progressives” nor the Nazi-style antisemites who are now in the MAGA mainstream. I’m referring to the number of Palestinians that the Hamas-run “Ministry of Health” in Gaza claims have died at the hands of the Israeli military. This is now over 30,000, but I have always thought there was no reason whatsoever to trust these figures. I have even argued in this space that the statistics could be completely fabricated, rather than just “exaggerated,” as Soviet industrial production statistics were invented out of whole cloth back in the day.
There is now substantial evidence that my suspicions were correct. Abraham Wyner, Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, presents damning proof in an article that the numbers Hamas has presented are statistically impossible, beginning with the fact that they have gone up with geometric, straight-line regularity, a thing which anybody who has spent any time looking at graphs based on real-world data knows is out of the question. But his whole analysis is well worth reading.
There is also the fact, which has been known all along, that Hamas refuses to say how many of the alleged dead were its cadres and how many were civilians. Yet, the terrorist group recently admitted that it has lost six thousand of its rapist-murderers, while the Israeli military’s estimate is 12,000. So even before we get to the statistical proof, the idea that the Israeli military has wantonly killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, upon which the “genocide” accusation implicitly rests, was extremely dubious.
The question is why everybody from non-fascist media to President Biden in his State of the Union speech last night has swallowed Hamas’s body-count propaganda. The answer, I think, is a bit subtler than the “confirmation bias” shown by people who already hated Israel and regarded it as a “settler-colonialist” country populated by evil “White” Jews. (That last bit is another damn lie, with about half of the Israeli Jewish population having their roots in the Middle East, North Africa, or Ethiopia, and the other half having been expelled by European Christians who most certainly did not regard them as “White.”)
For the non-haters in government, media, and the general public, there is an implicit faith in numbers as being “impartial,” coupled with a near-total ignorance of statistics. If we don’t have “hard numbers,” we post-post-moderns are bewildered and bereft, feeling ourselves cast back into a pre-scientific world. But this is a purely subjective feeling—there is nothing unscientific about confessing that one does not have the facts, and then trying to learn them. It is certainly true that many innocent Gaza Palestinians have died terrible deaths in this war, children included, and that there is widespread hunger in the Gaza Strip that President Biden is now stepping in to address. But we do not have accurate casualty figures, and we must stop accepting made-up numbers from those who started this war with a deliberate slaughter of the innocent as a substitute, or as any kind of guide to what our moral stance or our policies should be.
Emanuel Goldstein 