Rep. Rashida Tlaib: “But Palestinians are not just numbers. Behind these numbers are real people — mothers, fathers, sons, daughters — who have had their lives stolen from them and their families torn apart. And we should not be trying to hide it. These are innocent children and babies who have been bombed in their tents, burned alive, dismembered and deliberately starved to death. Where is our shared humanity in this chamber? There is so much anti-Palestinian racism in this chamber that my colleagues don’t even want to acknowledge that Palestinians exist at all, not when they’re alive and now not even when they’re dead. It’s absolutely disgusting. This is genocide denial.”
lawmakers have barred the U.S. State Department from citing death toll figures provided by the Gaza Ministry of Health
I wonder if the issue is the source? I don’t know anything about the Gaza Ministry of Health to know how accurate their reporting might be.
The Gaza Ministry of Health has been the most accurate reporter in the region for decades, to the point that even Israel and the IDF use their numbers. If anything, their current estimates err on the low side as a result of so much infrastructure being destroyed in Gaza and the health ministry only counting bodies that have been found. This study published in Lancet estimates that “up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza” after combining all direct and indirect factors such as the ongoing famine created by the siege.
Yup, I looked more into it, and they do indeed seem trustworthy. I just knee-jerk question whether an org is trustworthy if they have a clear motivation to misrepresent the truth.
Good instinct. But doesn’t hold true in this instance. I too had that instinct at the beginning of this round of genocide until I did some reading.
Lol, I don’t think that’s it.
On 10 November 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US intelligence community has growing confidence that death toll reports from the Gaza Health Ministry are roughly accurate. The article also reported that despite US officials had growing confidence, they did not have enough information to confirm for sure.
In January 2024, Israeli news magazine Mekomit reported that Israeli intelligence officials had concluded that Health Ministry casualty reports are generally reliable and are used in briefings to senior officials.
So yeah, that’s probably not it. I just instinctively distrust orgs that have a clear motive to misreport figures (i.e. inflating numbers could get other countries to intervene on Gaza’s behalf).
yes, it’s the source; but not in the way you might be thinking.
the assumption is that anything out of a gazan mouth must be propaganda, but they’re the only ones on the ground counting and their numbers are in line with estimates from other groups and lower than some of them.
The Gaza Ministry of Health has been recognized as a believable source (under the circumstances of being in a state of war since 2007) by the US government for years. This is a purely political move.
Whaaaaatttt?
This world.
Why is this surprising? America was founded on genocide and settler colonialism, those are core values.
Most countries were.
Maybe most countries need to be reorganized along different lines that don’t have direct traces to said settler colonialism and genocide.
Welcome to WW3, the last war.
I dug up the roll call for this vote, if anyone wants to look up how their representative voted.
How did so many vote yes for this? Mine didn’t, but that’s kind of a no brainer given their constituency.
i’m somewhat happy that mine didn’t either
The American Empire requires a foothold in the Middle East, simple as that, really.
Shame to see Colin Allred voted yea. He’s the only hope we have to unseat Ted Cruz this year.
Let me guess where most of the yay votes came from…
Edit: checked and surprise! Most Aaye votes are Republican. Only actual surprise is that there are 62 Democrats in there who should spend a week in Gaza to understand what they really really votes for.
Most of NY, NJ, and CA reps
Wonder where AIPAC spent all their money bribing and buying politicians
I don’t even look at the news like a crazy drunk and I know exactly how screwed up Gaza is at the moment. Sure let’s remove terrorists, but wow, they gotta go for a children’s hospital?? That’s more like a putin move.
Remember to never capitalize ruzzian or putin ever again. It’s a matter of principle. Perhaps we should not even use names to describe the two things at all.
Shall we stop capitalizing ‘amerikan’, ‘biden’, or ‘trump’ too, cracker?
Democrats are war profiters. They know what’s going on, and they know it brings big bucks to their corporate sponsors.
<citation needed>
Click the link at the top and see who voted to silence the numbers from Gaza…
House of Representatives Votes 269-144 to Ban State Department
from Citing Gaza Death Toll
Not allowing People to Know how many people have died is called being PRO LIFE!
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I Wouldn’t expect any less from this gold plated cesspool founded on genocide, slavery, and exploitation.
“herp derp but we saved the world and beat the Nazis!” Yeah, we fought and defeated the Axis… after they decimated our pacific fleet and brought the war to us. Prior to that, eugenics were popular here, and practiced. Hell, some of our most infamous capitalists supplied and financed both sides of that war, after all, private profit is what America is all about.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers-willing-business-partners/303146/
We’re dogshit, all the way back to the zealots fleeing Europe to be bigger religious prudes and nutters. The only amazing thing about our country is its ridiculously massive, undeserved ego.
I had no idea the Associated Press aided in the Holocaust.
Like, financially? Does it just mean they sold photographs to Nazi newspapers?
Censorship and cooperation with Nazi Germany. source
Good read after last week’s The Boys and our IRL nightmare
So, what I’m hearing is we have lots of room to do better. 😃
…our most infamous capitalists supplied and financed both sides…
Not the least of whom happened to be Fred Trump, the former president’s father. Unfortunately there is a large gap in his FBI file before and after the war, where we would expect to find documented proof of these activities. Still, it seems pretty clear what happened, and he certainly didn’t hide his racism publicly.
Not to mention that they didn’t join the war until the Russians and Germans had bled themselves dry on the eastern front and the soviets were well on their way to Berlin.
If you wanted to debate who won the war based on how many of their men, women, military and civilian sacrificed themselves willingly and unwillingly, the Russians were far and away the obvious victors.
20 million compared to America’s half million during the war.
The Russians died and killed more Germans than the Americans.
they didn’t join the war until the Russians and Germans had bled themselves dry on the eastern front and the soviets were well on their way to Berlin.
Your timeline is way off here. The US joined the war against Germany on Dec. 11th 1941, less than six months after Germany’s invasion of the USSR which had not yet even stalled out in front of Moscow. The Soviets weren’t “well on their way to Berlin” until late 1944, nearly three years later. Your other points are valid enough that you don’t need to utterly mangle your first one.
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And American businesses didn’t mind being allied with the Nazis leading up to the war (Hitler saw Henry Ford, an out and out antisemite, as an inspiration and was given the highest nazi award to a foreigner), plenty of American businesses either directly or indirectly helped to finance the German war machine leading up to the war, Nazi Germany didn’t build a multimillion dollar war machine in a global vacuum … and then America allied with Nazi veterans AFTER the war … it’s basically Nazi scientists that sent them to the moon.
Everyone made deals with the devil to benefit themselves at different times for different reasons.
We can’t point out one side allying with nazis and ignore others who did the same.
Even in Canada where I’m from a lot of critics and historians have pointed out that after the war … it was far more easier and acceptable to be a Nazi or a Fascist then it was to be a Socialist or Communist.
The absolute scale of the Eastern Front compared to the Western Front is mind-boggling, and American media and education downplays the tremendous sacrifices made by the Red Army and how much they accomplished.
During the war, the Western Allies were more than happy to have Nazi Germany and the USSR bleed each other out as much as possible, and then pretend they were team members on equal footing.
This is why we don’t like censorship culture.
Everyone who summons a demon to help their cause thinks they can put a leash on the demon and keep it in its lane.
LADY, WE DONT TALK ABOUT THE GENOCIDES THAT WE COMMMIT
That’s cuz it’SS SSettler SSolidarity in action between Amerikkka and ISSrael…
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The provision specifically states that funding will not be “made available” for the State Department “to cite statistics obtained from the Gaza Health Ministry.”
This seems like rhetoric without any actual substance or consequences
The Gaza health ministry are the only ones that have real numbers. And they’re probably barely counting now because all the hospitals have been bombed. Everyone else only has estimates.
No argument here, but seems like this bill says specifically there won’t be any funding made available to cite this statistic, which it sounds like the State Department would have plenty workarounds for. This is why I said this seems like empty rhetoric
No funding made available is just the way Congress writes laws. It’s all about allocating where money goes. And it’s not like the state department was itching to say anything that puts Israel in a bad light.
Is this russia?
Nope, it’s good 'ol America, doing American things.
No, wrong plutocracy
What the fuck.
Man what the fuck. What is their justification for this.
that anything coming from a gazan mouth must be propaganda; but they’re the only ones on the ground counting their numbers are smaller than others’ estimates
Should be mentioned that the Israeli gov kicked out all the other human rights orgs
The American Empire requires Israel as an Imperialist foothold in the Middle East. They will protect Israel and manufacture consent as much as they can to prevent public backlash.
They actually don’t even need Israel, Turkey is our NATO ally already and has the same access to the sea. Obviously Erdogan is a authoritarian dickshit, but at least they’re not actively committing a genocide.
Israel has no dramatic geopolitical value to the US at this point, they’re basically just a client. Though you wouldn’t think it by the way Netanyahu yanks Biden around by his testicles. The unquestioning support for Israel is ideological for people like Biden, and for others it’s all the money from AIPAC and JStreet
This vote, not to mention the history of the last 70 years, shows that they very much do think they need Israel.
“as we are prevented from giving numbers, we will now read out every name…”
alternately: "As we are now forbidden from using the gaza health ministry, let us cite this study published in Lancet that puts the number of dead at “up to 186,000” from all factors including direct bombings and the ongoing famine created by the IDF’s siege.
when pbs did that during the afghanistan and iraq wars for american service personnel; they got so much blowback that they had to stop.
Who got them blowback?
congress
Why would that make them stop?
some of pbs’ funding comes from congress and it was threatened unless pbs stops.
15% comes from Congress, most of it comes from donations and sponsorship.
I doubt PBS has 15% slack in their budget, so a 15% cut would cause a lot of havoc.
