Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
[flagged] How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers (tabletmag.com)
11 points by Tomte on March 12, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments


This has been posted and flagged multiple times in the past day, but is reposted again by multiple users and even multiple times by the same user.


You are not kidding. This is the 11th submission

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=tabletmag.com


Is there something wrong with the content?


yes. it doesn't fit the narrative


Yes, this is pretty much just pseudo-statistical nonsense. Its like it is taken right from the playbook of Trump’s election denial or a fringe Climate change denial. The graphs show limited data which doesn’t actually indicated what they say it indicates. Speculations are drawn without any justification for doing so, and the conclusion has nothing to do with presiding arguments raised.


I think it raises valid questions, can you elaborate what's wrong with the article?


First of all it looks at suspiciously limited data (Oct 26th to Nov 11th) when we know more data is available. This is a known tactic from climate deniers who claim e.g. that data from a single weather station in Canada from October 2006 to June 2014 shows the world is actually cooling.

Second of all it makes vague assumptions about distributions without clarifying or even justifying why it should have a different distribution. This is straight from the playbook of Trump’s election denialism where some variation of election results was somehow proof of tampering[1].

With statistics you can find any results you want if you look at limited enough data from a large enough pool, and you can find any abnormality you want by giving unrealistic expectations. This is why you need to clarify which distribution you expect, and—more importantly—justify it by pointing at other examples from similar pools. This is never done here, which is why I call it pseudo-statistical nonesence. Stating it is abnormal is not enough, even when you provide some fancy box plots to do so.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etx0k1nLn78


Whatever. When you start throwing around your "client denialism" and "election denialism" (which is pretty humorous when you consider this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoMfIkz7v6s&list=FLXm60MzHvz...), you make it pretty clear that you have a pre-determined narrative, and in this case, one that supports terrorists.

A classic example of inflated Hamas statistics from their Ministry of Truth is the hospital "bombing" that was actually a failed Hamas rocket. If you look at the time between the explosion and when they announced that "500 people were dead", it was not physically possible to have gone through the site, actually counted casualties, and determined how many are dead and wounded.

Hamas' strategy is to win public sympathy for a legitimate response to their terrorism, and this is how they do it; grossly inflate their casualty numbers and pretend like they are the victims, when in fact, they are not.


The casualty number comes from the Gaza Ministry of Health, not Hamas directly. It is taken by counting names. These names can be cross referenced with the Israeli controlled population registry of Gaza. They can also be searched on the internet, and in many cases you will find real people behind these names, with social media profiles, graduation records, employee profiles, obituaries, etc. This list is public, so you are free to download it and search for evidence of tampering, duplicates, fabrications, people still alive, people not from Gaza etc.

To save you time, I’d like to inform you that this has been done, and the conclusion is that the count published by the ministry of health is believable. But again you are free to prove me wrong and search for these abnormalities.

I will not engage on the question whether the human caused climate change is real or whether the 2020 US presidential election results were fraudulent. I take it as self evident that any arguments to the contrary are indeed conspiracy theories with no basis in reality.


“Overall, we rate Tablet Magazine as right-center biased based on an editorial bias that moderately favors the pro-Israel nationalist right. We also rate them Mostly Factual in reporting rather than High due to the promotion of conspiracy theories despite a clean third-party fact check record.”

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/tablet-magazine


What's wrong with being center right? Why can Al Jazeera articles be thoroughly shared and debated but this can't?


As seen during COVID, where "conspiracy theory" = "what turns out to be true" later.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: