NOAH ROTHMAN: Yet Another Gaza Famine That Wasn’t.
Maybe you can spot the fallacy in the following:
If you can, you should congratulate yourself on possessing the capacity for critical rationality even when evaluating claims that cast Israel in a bad light. That faculty renders you more perceptive than much of the Western journalistic establishment.
Such was the commitment of the international press to the notion that Israel is deliberately engineering a famine in the Gaza Strip that it accepted at face value a claim so logically deficient that an elementary school student should be able to identify the sophistry in it.
“Around 14,000 babies could die in the next 48 hours if many more aid trucks do not reach Gaza, the U.N.’s humanitarian chief says,” read the claim promulgated by a variety of news outlets, including a since-deleted social-media post promoted by NBC News.
The first tell readers of this piece will encounter is that the initial 540 words of the report accompanying the post are devoted not to the imminent humanitarian catastrophe that is about to befall the Palestinian population. Rather, it is replete with quotes from critics of Benjamin Netanyahu insisting that the resumption of Israeli combat operations against Hamas risks consigning the Jewish State to “pariah state” status. Indeed, for the prime minister, “killing babies is a pastime,” one of his domestic critics charged.
When it eventually gets around to exploring the allegation it broadcast on social media, NBC News couched the claim: “Around 14,000 babies face severe malnutrition if a lot more aid trucks don’t reach the Palestinian enclave soon, U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC on Tuesday,” the report read.
That was a “clarification” from the original claim that NBC News and many other journalistic enterprises promoted. Their mistake was to trust the BBC’s reporting and their source, a U.N. functionary. “There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them,” Fletcher told the British media venue — a claim that horrified and inflamed the civilized world. The BBC ran with it. Only later did the outlet ask him “how he had arrived at that figure.” Fletcher “said there were ‘strong teams on the ground’ operating in medical centers and schools — but did not provide further details.”
As Rothman wrote above, NBC really had the airbrushes on high today, ultimately deleting the following tweet:
The photo is from Yemen, you say?
In the London Spectator, Brendan O’Neill writes: The UN’s claim about babies dying in Gaza is unravelling.
The story originated in comments made by a UN official on the Today programme. ‘There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we reach them,’ listeners were told. The UN’s man was pressed – gently, one should note – about how he arrived at this figure. He said something about how the UN’s ‘strong teams on the ground’ are feeding back such chilling predictions.
It went viral. It ignited some of the worst Israelophobia – and outright anti-Semitism – I’ve seen since 7 October 2023. Social media’s cesspit of bigotry bubbled even more furiously than usual. ‘Evil’, cried leftists whose entire personality is hating Israel. ‘Satanic demons’, said hard-right cranks who hate the Jewish nation because they hate Jews.
And then the claim unravelled. Belatedly the BBC offered some clarification. The UN has now said, it reported, that it’s possible there will be 14,100 ‘severe cases of malnutrition’ among Gazan kids ‘aged six to 59 months’ over the next year if more aid does not get through. We need to get aid in ASAP, the UN said – ‘ideally within the next 48 hours’.
In short, there is no calamitous prospect of 14,000 babies starving in the next two days – thank God. Rather, the UN is concerned that there might be that number of acute cases of hunger among very young kids if nothing changes, aid wise, over the next year. This is a wholly different claim to the one that whipped up such a storm of frothing anti-Israel animus.
It’s good the BBC has offered clarification. Now we await the UN’s explanation for why one of its officials made such a thin and incendiary claim on live radio. The Spectator has contacted the UN to ask. Perhaps it was an honest mistake. But whatever their answer, I feel it’s too late. The damage is done.
I’m pretty sure the UN makes very few “honest” mistakes when it comes to who they take sides with in the Middle East.