[Boldface added]Veritas wrote:And you [Ajax18] complained about the media immediately leaping to pro-Palestinian narratives about the conflict, when in fact the opposite is true.
What really happened on 7th October?
In the interim, two weeks of blanket western media reporting that Hamas allegedly killed around 1,400 Israeli civilians during its 7 October military attack has served to inflame emotions and create the climate for Israel’s unconstrained destruction of the Gaza Strip and its civilian population.
Accounts of the Israeli death toll have been filtered and shaped to suggest that a wholesale civilian massacre occurred that day, with babies, children, and women the main targets of a terror attack.
Now, detailed statistics on the casualties released by the Israeli daily Haaretz paint a starkly different picture. As of 23 October, the news outlet has released information on 683 Israelis killed during the Hamas-led offensive, including their names and locations of their deaths on 7 October.
Of these, 331 casualties – or 48.4 percent - have been confirmed to be soldiers and police officers, many of them female. Another 13 are described as rescue service members, and the remaining 339 are ostensibly considered to be civilians.
While this list is not comprehensive and only accounts for roughly half of Israel’s stated death toll, almost half of those killed in the melee are clearly identified as Israeli combatants.
There are also so far no recorded deaths of children under the age of three, which throws into question the Israeli narrative that babies were targeted by Palestinian resistance fighters. Of the 683 total casualties reported thus far, seven were between the ages of 4 and 7, and nine between the ages of 10 and 17. The remaining 667 casualties appear to be adults.
This is also you:
[Boldface added]Veritas wrote:The point is the initial media reports of 1,400 civilian deaths was just pro-Israel propaganda like the 40 beheaded babies narrative. Ajax has been claiming the media has been strictly pro-Palestinian, which is almost laughable.
This is also you:
***Veritas wrote:So I see you're hung up on the word "initial"? I didn't mean to suggest the very first report the day of the attack, I meant the initial reports after body counts were made, and you're citing the media reports from the earliest stages when reports were in a state of flux.
You're obviously able to use Google but I wonder why you stopped after the first week?
[Boldface added]Brace yourself. On the 6th day Time Magazine reported 1,4000 civilian deaths and that became a staple that was repeated in regular media like the Washington Post. Hardly "smaller local" outlets
[images of 14 Google search "hits", including Time magazine report of 1400 Gaza casualties caused by Israeli shelling and Washington Post report of 1400 deaths of "civilians and soldiers"]
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Yeah, except for the dozen media outlets that said precisely what I said they were saying. And I could go on with a lot more, and you would have seen them yourself if you were honest about doing your so called "spot check."
Today, this is you:
[Emphasis added]Vertas wrote:
Yes, I probably should have treated a casual exchange with an anonymous internet guy as if it were my doctoral dissertation.
***
I don't always have two hours to make sure all my Ts are crossed....
***
The 1,400 death count for [Gazan] civilians on Oct 7th, was spread [as Isreali deaths] however, and a more precise Google search would show that, though not on major outlets.
***
***Veritas wrote:you spent 98% of your longwinded "response" belaboring the point about whether major news outlets initially reported 1,4000 civilian deaths on Oct 7th instead of addressing the more concerning issue that Israel is engaged in a propaganda campaign.
A careful reader would understand that the bullet points here are the facts that Israel 1) lied about a video claiming Hamas bombed a hospital and 2) completely staged a phone call with two bad actors in an attempt to prove Hamas had done it.
This is called moving the goalposts. Your original claim was that the media immediately leaps to pro-Israeli positions about the conflict. You, not me, chose to lead with a misleading article that claimed, among other things, that there had been "two weeks of blanket western media reporting that Hamas allegedly killed around 1,400 Israeli civilians". It also strongly insinuated that Israel had lied about the number of civilian casualties based on a BS analysis.
After I pointed out the misleading nature of the article, you told me what your point was: "The point is the initial media reports of 1,400 civilian deaths was just pro-Israel propaganda."
After I disputed that claim, you posted 14 hits from a Google search that you claimed showed you were right. Except they didn't. Of the 14, the two you specifically pointed out -- Time Magazine and the Washington Post -- said the opposite of what you claimed. The same was true of another two hits: the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz. The fact that two of the leading Newspapers in Israel did not report 1400 deaths of Israeli citizens is strong evidence against any claim that the death tolls as reported were some kind of Israeli propaganda. Of the remaining 10, 5 don't qualify as major media outlets. Of the remaining 5, one was a guest op-ed and one was in a transcript that didn't identify who was making the claim. The remaining 3 hits were articles in major media sources. One was by a local reporter on a local Chicago story, and I supplied you with several examples of stories by the international news reporters around the same date who used the 1400 figure correctly. Another was a single AP story, and I supplied you with several examples of AP stories around the same date that used the figure correctly. A third was a single story by a NY television station, and their website search was so terrible that I gave up trying to find the story.
The point is, you made the claim as your first argument to Ajax18. When I criticized it, you doubled and tripled down. You posted what you claimed to evidence [and crowed about it as if it were a great victory], but you didn't do the homework you should have done to make sure your "evidence" supported your claim. If you're not willing to spend the time and effort to read your own goddamn sources, you have no business citing them as evidence. Period. Whining about how long it would have taken to read your own sources is pathetic.
I did the basic homework you should have done. And when faced with the evidence that your sources don't support your claim, you move the goal posts to "The 1,400 death count for civilians on Oct 7th, was spread however, and a more precise Google search would show that, though not on major outlets. " So, now you're claiming that Time's reporting of Palestinian civilian deaths was spread as an accurate representation of Israeli civilian deaths. No evidence at all. Just like your original assertion. And, you qualify it as "though not on major outlets." Again, goal post shift. Your claim precisely that major outlets had misreported the figure as part of a pro-Israeli propaganda claim. Pro-tip: that's not how you admit being wrong. Here's how you do that:
But what you finally do was pretend that what you repeatedly stressed as "the point" was never the point at all and imply that I'm being somehow unreasonable in spending the time and effort to show that your claim was complete BS. In fact, you now claim that your point wasn't that the media immediately takes pro-israel positions, it's that Israel is engaging in propaganda.Res Ipsa wrote:I was wrong about the Xit about the missle.
You're moving the goalposts, running away from your prior posts, and claiming that debunking your prior claims is unreasonable.
You've already shown me that you won't make the effort to read, let alone vet, the sources you assert support your claims. Why should I waste my time doing your homework for you?
Israel and Hamas are at war. If you don't think that both Hamas and Israel are engaging in propaganda, you're naïve as hell. I take that as a given, so I approach the claims both sides make with a high level of skepticism. My point was, and has consistently been, that your claim that there was a pro-Israel media propaganda campaign that falsely claimed that 1400 Israeli civilians were killed is 100% false. And I've done that.
Are your other two claims about Israeli propaganda correct? I have no idea. I am, however, skeptical of your claim that it has been conclusively proven that the alleged Hamas call was faked by Israel. Has it really, or have you just accepted a claim at face value without vetting it -- just like you swallowed the false claims in the article from The Cradle you quoted? The example of claims similar to this that I always keep in mind is Professor Steven Jones of BYU -- the man who "conclusively proved" that fires in the World Trade Center towers could not have caused the collapse of the towers. It's easy to claim "conclusively proved" -- it's really difficult to actually "conclusively prove" things that involve interpretation of data. Again, I can't trust you to have vetted your sources or even tried to examine evidence relevant to your claims. So I'm not willing to waste my time on your claims about things I've never argued.
I do want to call attention to some things you've said that I find repugnant.
The implication that Hamas's attack is somehow morally justified if it's just soldiers that were killed is itself repugnant. But to suggest that Israeli civilians are only "technically civilians" because they once served in the military for a couple of years is morally indefensible. And when you extended that argument to children -- I don't have words for that. And before you try to gaslight the readers by claiming you were only talking about how Hamas thinks, that's not what you actually said. You were the one who called Israeli civilians only "technical civilians," followed by a statement that you were "pretty sure" that your claim is what Israel's enemies think. You presented an argument that Israeli civilians, including children, are valid targets for terrorism without once expressing disapproval, let alone condemnation, of rationalizing mass murder of civilians including children by claiming they are valid targets for terrorism.Veritas wrote:This situation is also obscured by the fact that every Israeli who turns 18 is compelled to join the military. So while most Israelis are technically civilians, the bulk of them have military training and experience fighting Palestinians. And I'm pretty sure that's how they're viewed by their enemies.
But just as repugnant is this:
I'll make this simple: pushing back on your simplistic, biased, lazy, hair on fire, BS posts has nothing to do with being Jewish. Frankly, your question smacks of Jew baiting. No one here has been "triggered" by "any criticism" of Israel. You're engaging in a disgusting ad hominem fallacy specifically targeted at Jews.Veritas wrote:Serious question though: Are you or anyone else on this forum Jewish? And I don't mean the Mormonesque "adopted" kind. Some of you seem to be uncharacteristically triggered by any criticism of Israel.
Go to hell.
