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Biden parrots Hamas statistics

Surely accepting Hamas’ lies is a small price to pay — it only hurts Israel, after all — to ensure the reelection of Joe Biden.

By Hugh Fitzgerald, Frontpage Magazine

In his State of the Union speech, Joe Biden repeated, without any hint of skepticism, the figure put out by Hamas, unverified and unverifiable, of the number of Gazans killed in the current war.

This is quite a change for the President. On October 26, when asked by a reporter about Hamas’ figures on casualties, Biden replied “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.”

Then, after adding that Israel should be “careful” about “going after the folks that are propagating this war,” he reiterated skepticism of the casualty number: “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”

That was then. But on March 7, he had apparently decided that he could have every confidence in Hamas figures, for he relied on them in his speech, without a hint of his former skepticism.

What changed his mind? Could it have been the desire to justify the pressure his administration is now putting on Israel, trying to get it to agree to a very long ceasefire, and to refrain from entering Rafah, which the Israeli government believes it must do if it is to eliminate Hamas as a military threat?

Biden is no longer interested in expressing skepticism about Hamas figures; he accepts — or publicly pretends to, which is even worse — the figures put out by Hamas.

More on this volte-face can be found here: “Biden parrots Hamas propaganda in State of the Union speech,” Elder of Ziyon, March 8, 2024:

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During President Biden’s State of the Union address last night, he said:

This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of whom are not Hamas.

Biden just confirmed and validated the biggest Hamas lie about the war.

There is no source for the “30,000” number besides Hamas. None whatsoever.

And we know Hamas lied about the death tolls of various specific events during the war, especially those that were blamed on Israel but were actually done by terrorists.

Hamas routinely lies about the “innocent civilians” killed by the Israelis.

Remember the claim about a “massacre at Jenin,” when Hamas and other terror groups accused the IDF of killing “500 civilians,” and it was later confirmed that there had been no massacre, but a firefight in which 52 Palestinians, at least 45 of whom were confirmed to be combatants, were killed.

In the current war in Gaza, Hamas reported that an Israeli airstrike had hit the Al-Ahli Hospital, killing 500 people. After a thorough investigation, both American and Israeli intelligence concluded that there had been no Israeli airstrike.

Instead, a rocket launched from Gaza at Israel by Palestinian Islamic Jihad had misfired and fallen short, inside Gaza, landing not on the hospital itself but on the parking lot beside it.

And there were not “500 killed,” but rather, between 10 and 50.

The latest tall tale was Hamas’ claim that IDF soldiers had killed up to 100 innocent civilians queuing for food; the IDF never fired on those Palestinians.

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It did explain that it had fired warning shots as some Palestinians – there were 12,000 besieging those trucks laden with food – came toward them, and then, when some Palestinians came within several meters of the IDF forces, the IDF used live fire; it estimates it may have killed “at most” ten people who had refused to stop after the warning shots, but were moving menacingly toward them.

Abraham Wyner, Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote an article in Tablet this week that showed how unlikely the casualty figures from the Gaza health ministry are from a statistical viewpoint, looking at the first weeks of the war when the ministry broke down the alleged women and children casualties.

On the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported.

This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children.

If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0.

The daily number of children reported to have been killed is totally unrelated to the number of women reported.

The R2 is .017 and the relationship is statistically and substantively insignificant.

This lack of correlation is the second circumstantial piece of evidence suggesting the numbers are not real.

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But there is more. The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported.

Again, this is expected because of the nature of battle.

The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together.

But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real.

…Another red flag… is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low.

This by itself strongly suggests that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked.

But we know from the IDF that so far — by mid-March — it has managed to kill between 13,000 and 15,000 Hamas fighters, that is, about 50% of the total pre-war number of Hamas fighters.

Why should the Bidenites care? By now repeating such Hamas casualty figures uncritically, Biden hopes to win back those disaffected Arab voters in “critically important” Michigan, and all those “young progressives” across the land who are apparently exercised by the administration’s refusal to be sufficiently anti-Israel.

The State of the Union message must have pleased them. Surely accepting Hamas’ lies is a small price to pay — it only hurts Israel, after all — to ensure the reelection of Joe Biden.