Truth requires research to yield hard data

IT is not the kind of fake news that claims as information something fabricated that should worry us. It is fake news or flawed analysis that conceals or just doesn’t report data that is the real enemy of truth, as I will illustrate in two cases — the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the anti-China frenzy over our disputes with the Asian superpower.

A recent column of Ranhilio Aquino, a colleague in this newspaper, whose file photo shows him in regal cleric attire to exude authority, entitled “For Israel, it is survival!” is an excellent example of this lying-by-omission tack.

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

The Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 killed 1,200 civilian and hostaged 200. In retaliation, 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza as a result of Israeli airstrikes and military actions, with 14,000 women and children. Try to wrap your brain over that data: 35 Palestinians for each Israeli killed. Is that justice or beastly revenge?

A study in the prestigious medical journal Lancet even estimated that the Gaza toll exceeded 186,000 Palestinians due to starvation, malnutrition and disease due to the Israeli bombings. Thousands estimated to have been killed have been left in the rubble of bombed residential buildings, as the Palestinians lacked the necessary machinery to dig up the dead buried deep in concrete.

Over 22,600 housing buildings in Gaza have been destroyed, including public infrastructure facilities providing electricity and water supply. Scores 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 totally unlivable. At least 117 journalists have been killed in Gaza due to Israeli airstrikes, and 200 medical personnel, with evidence showing that many of these noncombatants were specifically targeted through drone surveillance.

1.5 million

Over 1.5 million Palestinians have been displaced from Gaza due to intense Israeli airstrikes and a ground invasion. The United Nations reported that by late November 2023, around 1.37 million people had sought shelter in overcrowded and poorly maintained UNRWA facilities. Many Palestinian refugees have been forced to an area several times, after the Israeli sadistically asked them to move, threatening them with bombings if they didn’t.

In contrast, there has not been any displacement of Israeli settlers from the West Bank. Instead, Israeli settler violence against Palestinians living there has risen, forcing 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 Christian clerics living in ivory towers 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, owing to training, discipline and genuine love for country, prevails over its enemies.” He doesn’t, of course, dare to mention that the Israeli army with all those admirable attributes killed over 42,000 defenseless, unarmed civilians. Videos have been released of young Israeli soldiers beating Palestinians, making fun of their killings and even tying a Palestinian casualty on top of a tank.

Prevails

Ranhilio claims that Israel prevails over its enemies due to “its army’s training, discipline and genuine love for country.” Again, if Ranhilio only did a bit of research, he would realize that Israel owes its prowess in killing Palestinians because it has been the largest recipient of US military and economic aid, totaling a staggering $310 billion.

For example, the Israeli Defense Force could not have assassinated the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah if it wasn’t provided by the US with its F-5 fighter planes that dropped American-made 2,000-pound BLU-109s with JDAM guidance kits.

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

And why does the US support Israel despite the fact that the small country is committing grave crimes against humanity? Noted 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, “US and Israel are joined at [the] hips.” No politician striving for national office has dared go against the pro-Israel lobbying groups, some of the biggest contributors to campaign financing.

Jewish elite

The American Jewish elite are deeply ensconced in America’s key institutions, such as banking, the movie industry and even in organized crime during the Mafia eras. One of America’s biggest blockbusters was the Jewish Otto Preminger’s 1960s movie (starring Paul Newman) “Exodus,” which glorified Israel’s founding by Jewish refugees. “Just about none of it is true,” an article in the Open University of Israel pointed out.

The creation 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 that advocated the establishment of a Jewish homeland in response to widespread antisemitism in Europe. Jews began immigrating to Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. In the pre-state period (1920s-1940s), Zionist paramilitaries like the Irgun, Lehi, Haganah and Palmach massacred Palestinians to threaten them out of their lands.

The mass extermination of Jews by Nazis during World War II gave impetus to the Zionist movement, with the aid of the British and the Americans, to gradually marginalize the Palestinians and force them out of the lands they had occupied for centuries, that they have been contained 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 its warrior to keep at bay the USSR in the area during the Cold War, and now Russia and China.

Analysts now think though that the US’ real target is the conquest oil-rich Iran, after it had captured another oil-rich nation Iraq in its 2003 invasion, on the justification, now proven a fabrication, that it had “weapons of mass destruction” that threatened the Middle East, and therefore the world’s oil supply.

It would be history’s dark humor for its two proxies. Israel in the Middle East and the Philippines in Asia, to provoke a global war, the former when it attacks Iran and the latter if it increases the number range of US missiles on its soil. I’m afraid such a scenario may be upon us.

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

---

Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao

X: @bobitiglao

Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com

The post Truth requires research to yield hard data first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.

Truth requires research to yield hard data
Source: Breaking News PH