CONTEXT?

The New York Times just published a flashy article on its website accusing Israel of deliberately starving Palestinian children. They tell us, “Obtaining enough to eat had already been a struggle for many in the blockaded Gaza Strip before the war. An estimated 1.2 million Gazans had required food assistance, according to the United Nations, and around 0.8 percent of children under the age of 5 in Gaza had been acutely malnourished, the World Health Organization said." They also explain how, five months after starting a war with Israel, the rate of malnutrition for those children whose families moved them south toward Rafah, as the Israeli military encouraged, is many times higher now: roughly 5%.

That's a curious set of statistics to throw at people without any context of any kind. Why leave out any relevant comparisons when we can be sure their source, the WHO, reports such figures for other nations in the region and across the globe, today and historically? Why, of course, unless you're trying to manipulate people? Well, so, would it shock you to learn that nations not "struggling under a brutal blockade", "under siege in concentration camp-like apartheid conditions for decades" sustain similar numbers? Would it surprise you to learn the wealthiest nations in the region have similar peacetime statistics to these wartime rates in Gaza? I would be surprised if such information didn't cause heads to explode, given the weight and volume of the ubiquitous misinformation campaigns saturating the entire English-speaking world.

But it wouldn't surprise me or anyone who has read my writing over the last few months because this is exactly the same reality (and propaganda strategy) I pointed out when I stumbled upon life expectancy numbers for Palestinians. At that time I showed, very much counter to the popular narrative and what most folks intuit from everything they're told, Palestinian life expectancy is above the global average, the same as the continental averages for the Americas, exceeding those for Asia and Africa, and higher than many of its neighbouring nations, nations in the region, and also many of those people you might be inclined to consider to be peers of the Palestinians.

So how do the nations of the world rank when it comes to malnutrition among our youngest? “Severe wasting prevalence among children under 5 years of age” has been estimated at around 5% of the population over the last decade in places such as Egypt, India, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen, to name a few. At the same time the rate is found to be roughly 3% in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, and Thailand. But don't take my word for it, go look up the figures yourself.

Or if you wish to corroborate the above data, perhaps comparing nations by the percentage of their populations suffering "severe food insecurity", you might look at numbers from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Keeping at the front of your mind all the terms and phrases you've seen and heard repeated everywhere (such as "blockade" and "apartheid", "open air prison" and "decades under siege"), where would you rank Palestinians among the family of nations for the percentage of their population experiencing severe food insecurity prior to the war? (We don't have more recent numbers...)

Do you think a larger share of Palestinians or Jordanians were experiencing hunger in 2020? And how do you think Palestinians compared to Iranians or Morrocans? What about South Africans or Kenyans? Far less hunger than Palestinians or far more? What about Argentinians or Brazilians, Malaysians or Thais, Tongans or Fijians? Or how do you think Palestinians compared to Mexicans or even Australians on food insecurity? Well, if you've been subscribed to the New York Times or spending too much time on social media or been to any of the weekly rallies endorsing "by any means necessary" you may wish to sit down before absorbing the following graph.

Now take everything you've been told and everything you think you know about the Israeli blockade (and that which was enacted by neighbouring nations with the support of nations throughout the world) along with anything you know from recent months and contrast that with the above starvation information. Okay. Does the severe wasting in kids and broader food insecurity data look like Israel has been engaged in a campaign to deliberately starve and inflict harm upon ordinary Palestinians, particularly kids, as suggested in the New York Times? Or does it look more like they were attempting and failing to keep weapons and tools out of the hands of those who seek their extermination? Seems pretty obvious.

Given the above, and given the WHO numbers in the NYT article (that suggest those in Gaza observing the recommendations of the "Israeli Offence Force" and the "apartheid regime" behind it are now experiencing a Saudi Arabia or Egypt level of severe malnutrition five months into "the most brutal war anyone has ever seen" and a "clear attempt to commit genocide by starvation"), is there any chance you're receiving anything other than an unrelenting avalanche of anti-Semitic noise everywhere you turn — even from that revered shaper of language, influencer of media and political ecosystems, America's newspaper of record, winner or 137 Pulitzer prizes, and "blatant supporter of Israel" that is the New York Times? The answer to that also seems obvious.

Well, that only leaves us to wonder about the source of this din of blood libel spilled all over the front page of the most important paper on earth. The author of the piece is a man named Bilal Shbair. When I search that name I find he's not only contributed to the Times three such articles in just three weeks but is also a regular contributor to NPR (another great source of noise) and has similar work published across America and in pan-Arab media outlets, too. 

Oh yeah, and he's an UNWRA school teacher who lives in Gaza. UNRWA: that Western funded, Palestinian populated, aid agency that was prior to the war notorious for their corruption and dissemination of Judeophobic literature and their contribution to the indoctrination of children with jihadist propaganda. Right. And the folks who, since the war, have been found sheltering terrorists, concealing trafficking tunnels, and permitting their property to be used as a refuge for kidnappers, launchpads for rocket attacks against Israeli civilians, and to carry out hostilities against Israeli troops — all in breach of their own mandate, that of the UN broadly, and the Geneva Conventions. Oh, and whose members participated in and endorsed indiscriminate massacre. Yeah. But, of course, there's no need for anyone to spell any of this out or even just be forthcoming about the man's status as a Gazan or UNRWA employee. That would only be more filthy and irrelevant context.