Make what you will of the president, but in a speech celebrating Ramadan, Biden
repeated the claim that “30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, including thousands of children.” The president of the United States now not only rejects the claims of our allies in Israel but accepts the declarations of a group that is not only on the Justice Department’s terror list — one that recently murdered, raped, and kidnapped American citizens.
A few weeks after the Oct. 7 attack, as Jeryl Bier
reminds us, Biden admitted Hamas casualty numbers were fake, saying he had “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.” (Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin
claimed not long that the number of dead women and children was “over 25,000” — perhaps still under the residual effects of his post-surgery morphine drip.)
In Tablet, Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School,
lays out the case that the Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers are an “obvious fake.” The near-perfect incremental daily uptick, despite the vagaries of battle, is the big giveaway — though there are other aspects that make zero sense. Wyner theorizes that the fake daily numbers vary too little because Hamas does “not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers.” Indeed, while Islamists excel at sexual torture and theocratic repression, they are less proficient at math. That does not stop pro-Hamas Westerners from pushing the “genocide” blood libel.
It took Israel, a sophisticated nation with many genuine experts, weeks to wade through the sinister wreckage of the Oct. 7 attack to get a proper tally of the dead. And yet, miraculously, whenever an Israeli attack is carried out, within hours — sometimes within the hour — Hamas can pinpoint not only the number of people who have died in wreckages but their ages and sex.
It should also be remembered that Hamas makes no distinction between civilian deaths and its terrorists. When Biden laments death using these statistics, he is lamenting the death of Hamas.
Israel contends that it has killed approximately 12,000 Hamas members. “If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low,” Wyner notes, “at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1.” Historically speaking, those numbers are remarkable for wars fought in dense urban quarters, which is where Hamas hides (or is aided by) civilians. Certainly, it is
better than how Americans have fared in similar situations trying to ferret out terrorists.
What’s changed with Biden? His administration was already teeming with Obama-era pro-Iranian voices. Now, Biden is apparently convinced that his 2024 electoral fortunes are bound up
in appeasing the hard-left activist class and pro-Hamas faction in Michigan and Minnesota. Knowing that spineless Jewish elected officials in the Democratic Party value partisanship over Israel, Biden, whose appeasement of Iran did much to set the groundwork for Oct. 7, is largely freed from worrying about moderates.
Joe Biden rejects the claims of Israel but repeats the ones of those who murdered, raped, and kidnapped Americans.
thefederalist.com