Israel Matzav

Those poor 'starving' 'Palestinians'

In the Sand Box, Martin Kramer catches the 'Palestinians' in yet another lie (Hat Tip: Lawhawk via Little Green Footballs):

The Boston Globe has just run an op-ed under the headline "Ending the Stranglehold on Gaza." The authors are Eyad al-Sarraj, identified as founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, and Sara Roy, identified as senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. The bias of the op-ed speaks for itself, and I won't even dwell on it. But I do want to call attention to this sentence:

Although Gaza daily requires 680,000 tons of flour to feed its population, Israel had cut this to 90 tons per day by November 2007, a reduction of 99 percent.

You don't need to be a math genius to figure out that if Gaza has a population of 1.5 million, as the authors also note, then 680,000 tons of flour a day come out to almost half a ton of flour per Gazan, per day.

A typographical error at the Boston Globe? Hardly. The two authors used the same "statistic" in an earlier piece. They copied it from an article published in the Ahram Weekly last November, which reported that "the price of a bag of flour has risen 80 per cent, because of the 680,000 tonnes the Gaza Strip needs daily, only 90 tonnes are permitted to enter." Sarraj and Roy added the bit about this being "a reduction of 99 percent."

...

What's the truth? I see from a 2007 UN document that Gaza consumes 450 tons of flour daily. The Palestinian Ministry of Economy, according to another source, puts daily consumption at 350 tons. So the figure for total consumption retailed by Sarraj and Roy is off by more than three orders of magnitude, i.e. a factor of 1,000. No doubt, there's less flour shipped from Israel into Gaza--maybe it's those rocket barrages from Gaza into Israel?--but even if it's only the 90 tons claimed by Sarraj and Roy, it isn't anything near a "reduction of 99 percent." Unfortunately, if readers are going to remember one dramatic "statistic" from this op-ed, this one is it--and it's a lie.

Kramer is right of course: We have to read any article about the 'Palestinians' critically, especially articles that involve numbers, since they have been known to play fast and loose with statistics. For example, who knows if that 1.5 million population number for Gaza is correct. And the next time you see that Gaza is "one of the most densely populated areas on earth," compare its population density with Tokyo or Hong Kong and de-bunk yet another lie.

Assuming the 'Palestinians' bought flour in Egypt (a big assumption), there's a good chance they did so using counterfeit Egyptian pounds printed on Hamas printing presses in Gaza.

And for those of you who really still believe that the 'Palestinians' only bought 'necessities' in Egypt, allow me to present this picture of a 'Palestinian' standing beside his new pride and joy (Hat Tip: Little Green Footballs):


But give them a state reichlet and they'll stop lying about their 'needs' to get international aid money and suddenly become self-supporting.

/sarc

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:13 AM