Mr CairnsSome comments here from Brendan O'Neill, ex-editor of Marxism Today and now a commentator for the Spectator.Now I know many on Forum see the Spectator as only slightly less 'right wing' than Der Stürmer.But I am sure you are more open minded than this and I look forward to reading your responses to the observations below he has made in the online version of the periodical."Its pummelling of Gaza is one of the most barbarous onslaughts against civilians in history, they say. New research suggests these feverish claims have no basis in truth. What Israel’s voluble haters call ‘mass murder’ is in fact a pretty normal war.Too many have made themselves the Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas.Strikingly, Hamas appears to have quietly dropped thousands of deaths from its casualty figures. Its fatalities list for March 2025 dispensed with 3,400 names that were contained in its lists in August and October last year. These include 1,080 children. Just like that, overnight, Hamas erased thousands of Gazans that it previously claimed had perished as a result of Israel’s actions.Salo Aizenberg, of the US-based non-profit group Honest Reporting, clocked the disparity. It seems these ‘deaths’ never happened, he says. ‘The numbers were falsified.’ That we’ve just witnessed the deletion of 3,400 ‘fully identified’ fatalities, 3,400 ‘deaths’ of actual named individuals, should give our media serious pause for thought before citing Hamas death counts.Andrew Fox, the former British paratrooper who now does research for the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), thinks Hamas is trying to make its death counts look more convincing. They’ve been ‘accepting names onto that list with no evidence whatsoever’, he says. Now it seems they’re removing the names ‘they cannot substantiate at all’. Are there others among the 50,000 fatalities we so often hear about who also aren’t dead, or who died, but not as a result of Israel’s war?Death counts from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health should always be treated with scepticism. The HJS has previously exposed Hamas’s over-reporting of fatalities among women and children. Then there’s Hamas’s failure to distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths. That it never tells us how many of its own militants are among the 50,000 who’ve supposedly died means the fundamental truth of the war, the reality of Israel’s just crusade against the army of anti-Semites that attacked it 18 months ago, is continually hidden from us.Israel says it has taken out 20,000 Hamas fighters. If that’s accurate, then far from being an act of genocidal lunacy, its war in Gaza is in truth a normal and successful battle with the evils of terrorism.Even if we accept Hamas’s claim that 50,000 have died, that 40 per cent of those deaths were of Hamas’s own bigoted killers means Israel’s military action is entirely of a piece with most other modern wars, where a similar civilian/combatant death ratio holds.It is the demographics of the death count from Gaza that are most telling. Studies – unbiased ones, that is – suggest that up to 72 per cent of the fatalities aged 13 to 55 are men. This backs up Israel’s claim that it is targeting fighting-age males (Hamas deploys even very young males to carry out its terror). The West’s noisy Israelophobes frequently say that as many as two-thirds of the dead in Gaza are women and children. There’s no evidence for this. It’s a defamation masquerading as a statistic.No sane person denies that the war in Gaza has caused enormous suffering, including for civilians.It is a moral outrage that Hamas brought this tragedy onto the Palestinian people with its fascistic assault on Israel on 7 October 2023. Yet the story we so often hear about Israel’s war – that it is uniquely murderous, a genocide, a bloodlusting assault on women and children – is just not true. It is heavy on hysteria and light indeed on facts.We’ve now had a year-and-a-half of the most unhinged animus for Israel. On our streets, on our campuses and most unforgivably in our press, the cry has gone out: Israel is one of the most murderous nations in history. One can’t help but hear the echo of old, dark bigotries in this curious loathing for Israel. The idea that the Jewish nation is inherently genocidal, that it targets children for ‘bloodletting’, resuscitates the medieval calumny that treated the Jews as a child-sacrificing race".
John Hawkes ● 117d