The Fora: A Higher Education Community

How do we know who exactly qualifies as a 'Hamas soldier'?   Do these men wear uniforms and carry official id?  Do they have Hamas-issued serial numbers and ranks, to be offered to Israelis who catch them?

Anyone see 'Civil War' yet?   Worth seeing?

Did you know that the plural of "therapy" is "therapy's"?  According to a lot of my students, it is.

The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.

Quote from: Parasaurolophus on Today at 09:18:09 AMT1 and refereeing today. Got a new referee request this morning, too, from a top subfield journal which specifically noted my 'general expertise', which is nice.

Good progress on T1 (I wish I didn't keep finding errors!), and read the new paper. No writing, though. Alas.

Quote from: spork on Today at 04:35:13 PMAs for the U.S. media, I haven't seen a single story that subtracts off an estimated number of dead Hamas soldiers from the total number of Gazans killed (which itself is a figure originating from Hamas).

Everyone has treated the Health Ministry's numbers as credible in the past, including Israel and the US government. That said, it's (1) clearly under-counting (because it's only counting those it can absolutely confirm), and (2) the infrastructure is now so degraded that keeping a reliable total tally is increasingly impossible.

That said, as of last month the estimate was 30k dead (~13k children), 70k injured, and ~10k missing (the death tally is now past 34k). At about the same time, Israel was claiming ~12k Hamas dead, while Hamas claimed and denied 6k. (Israel has provided no evidence for its numbers, however, and given what we know of its targeting practices--viz., 'male = Hamas' and 'bomb them in their homes at night', it's virtually guaranteed to be a vast over-count).

I can't speak to US media, of course (apart from print media, where these figures are definitely mentioned--but I don't haunt the big publications), but this is readily available and often cited (i.e. daily!) information in Canada and on the BBC. Hamas casualties are frequently, but not always, mentioned. I don't know that it really is appropriate not to count them as casualties, however; after all, we (rightly!) count IDF casualties from the October 7th attack, as well as the subsequent war (though it's worth pointing out that Israel has not been forthcoming about its casualty numbers). To subtract them sounds, to me, like an effort to sanitize the indiscriminate killing that is taking place.

And even if you buy the IDF's numbers--which you shouldn't--the ratio of one dead child to one dead Hamas fighter isn't exactly a great look.

Quote from: dismalist on Today at 03:45:45 PMAgitprop.

Hey, I resemble that remark!

As for the U.S. media, I haven't seen a single story that subtracts off an estimated number of dead Hamas soldiers from the total number of Gazans killed (which itself is a figure originating from Hamas).

We had something similar happen a few months ago.  A community service group from out of town booked our library community room for a series of Monday afternoons to offer their services.  We saw from their social media that they were promoting the sessions as taking place on Monday mornings.  So we had lots of people coming in during the mornings and having to be told to come back in the afternoon. 

We repeatedly contacted the agency in question to confirm the actual times and get the misleading announcements corrected.  It took a week or two before they finally got things changed.  Not sure how people at that agency are keeping their jobs either.  The whole thing made it very awkward for our staff, not to mention the patrons who showed up at the wrong times because they had been misinformed.

Agitprop.

Quote from: spork on Today at 11:57:40 AMThe USA also heavily subsidizes Egypt's military, as part of the Camp David Peace Agreement. In an excellent example of making America great again, ammunition fired at Egyptian pro-democracy demonstrators in January 2011 was manufactured in the USA with U.S. taxpayer money. Didn't see any Ivy League campus protests about that. Although I can list numerous other examples (looking at you, Saudi Arabia, killing Yemenis with your American weapons), but I won't.

I certainly took part in demonstrations related to those conflicts, but not at a US university, let alone an Ivy League institution. I can't, offhand, remember whether there were any. But let's suppose not. The fact that in the past students didn't come together to protest against American aid to Saudi Arabia or Egypt, if it is one, has no bearing on whether the students there here and now are right to protest American involvement in the war on Gaza. There will always be some other event we can point to that did not gather sufficient attention and outrage (though it certainly merited it), but that doesn't mean that the attention and outrage that some conflict does garner is misplaced, especially when it involves a client state of one's own country.

QuoteHamas, or what's left it of it, has managed to persuade, with the connivance/laziness of mainstream U.S. media outlets, a chunk of Ivy League college students that American white vs. brown race politics maps exactly to the Palestinian-Israeli situation. Score one for American ignorance.

This isn't a very plausible analysis. Hamas hasn't convinced anyone; instead, people have been convinced by the atrocities Israel has perpetrated in full public view. (I write this, incidentally, as the UN has uncovered mass graves at hospitals containing the headless, limbless, and handcuffed corpses of men, women, and children alike; but that's not what I mean, because it didn't take place in full public view.)


The most charitable explanation--and this is clearly the explanation Ockham's razor favours--is just that they've seen and heard about what's going on, and found it appalling, and they've seen their own government's response, and judged it wanting.