Truth requires research that produces hard data

IT is not the kind of fake news that claims there is some fabricated information we should be concerned about. It is fake news or flawed analysis that hides or simply does not report data that is the real enemy of the truth, as I will illustrate in two cases: the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the anti-China frenzy over our disputes with the Asian superpower.

A recent column by Ranhilio Aquino, a colleague at this newspaper, whose file photo shows him in royal clerical garb to project authority, entitled “For Israel is survival!” is an excellent example of this approach to lying by omission.

Ranhilio’s defense of Israel, that it is fighting for survival and that it has only responded to Hamas’s “unprovoked attacks,” lacks data that could easily have debunked his views:

Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 left 1,200 civilians dead and 200 taken hostage. In retaliation, 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza as a result of Israeli airstrikes and military actions, including 14,000 women and children. Try to think about that data carefully: 35 Palestinians for every Israeli killed. Is that justice or bestial revenge?

In fact, a study in the prestigious medical journal Lancet estimated that the death toll in Gaza exceeded 186,000 Palestinians due to hunger, malnutrition and disease caused by Israeli bombing. Thousands estimated to have died were left in the rubble of bombed residential buildings because Palestinians lacked the necessary machinery to exhume the dead buried deep in concrete.

More than 22,600 residential buildings in Gaza have been destroyed, including public infrastructure facilities providing electricity and water. Dozens of hospitals and schools have been bombed, including 10 health centers and 48 schools. This has raised suspicions that Israel’s goal is to make most of the Gaza Strip completely unliveable. At least 117 journalists have been killed in Gaza as a result of Israeli airstrikes, as well as 200 medical personnel, with evidence showing that many of these non-combatants were specifically targeted by drone surveillance.

1.5 million

More than 1.5 million Palestinians have been driven from Gaza as a result of heavy Israeli airstrikes and a ground invasion. The United Nations reported that by the end of November 2023, approximately 1.37 million people had sought shelter in overcrowded and poorly maintained UNRWA facilities. Many Palestinian refugees have been forced into an area several times after the Israelis sadistically asked them to move and threatened them with bombing if they did not.

In contrast, there has been no expulsion of Israeli settlers from the West Bank. Instead, Israeli settlers’ violence against the Palestinians living there has increased, driving them out of the area that was considered Palestinian territory. Israeli settlers are often supported by military forces.

Ranhilio doesn’t report all this hard data, an indication of the scholastic ideology he and the ivory-tower Christian clergy embrace, who don’t want to dirty their hands with facts. He pontificates: “This is Israel’s fight for survival – and it should not be blamed if its army, through training, discipline and genuine love of country, gains the upper hand over its enemies.” Of course, he does not dare to mention that the Israeli army, with all its admirable qualities, has killed more than 42,000 defenseless, unarmed civilians. Videos have been released of young Israeli soldiers beating Palestinians, ridiculing their killings and even tying a Palestinian victim on top of a tank.

Prevails

Ranhilio claims that Israel has the upper hand over its enemies because of “the army’s training, discipline and genuine love for the country.” Again, if Ranhilio did just a little research, he would realize that Israel owes its prowess at killing Palestinians to the fact that it has been the largest recipient of US military and economic aid, totaling as much as 310 billion dollars.

For example, the Israeli military could not have assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah if the US had not been supplied with its F-5 fighter jets that dropped American-made 2,000-pound BLU-109s with JDAM guidance kits.

Ironically, Nazi Germany was the only other state – after Israel – that had claimed that its genocide against a people was a matter of its people’s survival. During World War II, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler ordered that Jews be eliminated from the face of the earth, claiming that their blood had infected the Aryan race and that they were the source of all the world’s misery.

And why does the US support Israel, despite the fact that the small country is committing serious crimes against humanity? Renowned political scientist David Mearsheimer, in his book “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,” provides a mountain of data showing that, as he put it, “the US and Israel are linked at the hip.” No politician seeking national office has dared to go against the pro-Israel lobby groups, which are among the largest contributors to campaign finance.

Jewish elite

The American Jewish elite is deeply entrenched in America’s major institutions, such as banking, the film industry, and even organized crime during the mafia era. One of America’s biggest blockbusters was the 1960s film Exodus by Jewish Otto Preminger (starring Paul Newman), which glorified the founding of Israel by Jewish refugees. “Practically none of it is true,” said an article in the Open University of Israel.

The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was the culmination of decades of political moves by the so-called Zionist movement in the 19th century, which advocated the creation of a Jewish homeland in response to widespread anti-Semitism in Europe. Jews began to emigrate to Palestine, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. In the pre-state period (1920–1940), Zionist paramilitaries such as the Irgun, Lehi, Haganah and Palmach slaughtered Palestinians to threaten them from their land.

The mass extermination of the Jews by the Nazis during World War II gave the Zionist movement, with the help of the British and Americans, impetus to gradually marginalize the Palestinians and expel them from the lands they had occupied for centuries and which they had occupied for centuries. which are now in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Israel has become a pawn of the US, its proxy, in the Middle East, just as the Philippines has become its pawn in Asia. For the US, Israel is the fighter to keep the USSR at bay in the region during the Cold War, and now also Russia and China.

However, analysts now believe that the US’s real target is to conquer oil-rich Iran, after it conquered another oil-rich country Iraq in the 2003 invasion, based on the justification, now proven to be a fabrication, that it is had ‘weapons of mass destruction’. ‘ that threatened the Middle East and thus the world’s oil supply.

It would be the dark humor of history for his two proxies. Israel in the Middle East and the Philippines in Asia, to provoke a global war, the first if it attacks Iran and the second if it increases the number of US missiles on its territory. I fear such a scenario awaits us.

Next week: How the anti-China frenzy is similarly fueled by the same tactic of lying by omitting facts.

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