From Ian:
NGO Monitor: UN Agency Regularly Manipulates Data To Make Israel Look Bad
Sanders again inflates Gaza civilian death toll, though he’s getting closer
NGO Monitor: UN Agency Regularly Manipulates Data To Make Israel Look Bad
NGO Monitor on Thursday released a report highly critical of a UN agency deemed so biased in Jerusalem that the Foreign Ministry, according to diplomatic sources, stopped cooperating with it in any meaningful way several years ago.
The organization is the Jerusalem-based UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OCHA oPt).
According to the NGO Monitor report, the group “regularly presents data in a manipulative way that erases the context of terrorism and distorts law and morality.”
OCHA fails to distinguish between Palestinian civilians and attackers, thereby amplifying Palestinian casualty claims, and drawing a false symmetry between legal Israeli self-defense and illegal attacks by terrorists, the report stated.
As an example the report highlighted OCHA’s weekly “protection of civilians report” for the period of February 2-8.
“OCHA presents pie charts purporting to show the number of ‘Palestinian fatalities by Israeli forces in the oPt.’ Yet, this data as presented does not provide any information as to how the fatalities took place, including how many of the fatalities occurred while Palestinians were attempting to murder Israeli civilians or engaged in violent confrontations with Israeli law enforcement,” the report said. “As a result, it is impossible to make any meaningful assessments from OCHA’s figures.”
Sanders again inflates Gaza civilian death toll, though he’s getting closer
A day after he acknowledged that he got his numbers wrong when suggesting Israel killed over 10,000 Palestinian civilians during the 2014 war with Hamas, Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders again cited an incorrect and inflated figure for the civilian death toll in a US television interview.
On Thursday, Sanders and his campaign had belatedly acknowledged that the 10,000 figure he twice cited in a New York Daily News interview was wrong — actually some seven times the figure cited by the United Nations and Gaza’s Hamas rulers. According to the Anti-Defamation League, Sanders told its CEO Jonathan Greenblatt that he had accepted a correction provided during the course of that interview, and that he would henceforth “make every effort to set the record straight.”
Speaking on MSNBC on Friday morning, however, Sanders again cited an incorrect figure — though far less inflated this time. Acknowledging that he hadn’t known “the exact number” when he spoke to the New York Daily News, Sanders said that, “according to the United Nations, over 2,000 civilians were killed” in the war, and repeated his allegation that Israel’s military actions were “disproportionate.”
In fact, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) puts the Gaza civilian death toll in the 2014 war at 1,423, while Gaza’s terrorist rulers Hamas cite a similar number of 1,462. Israel has argued that the figure for civilian deaths is likely lower, since Hamas fought out of uniform in some cases and also had an interest in misrepresenting dead gunmen as civilians. Israel has also stressed that Hamas deliberately placed Gaza civilians in harm’s way, by emplacing its rocket launchers and terror tunnel openings in civilian areas.
The overall death toll in Gaza — of combatants and non-combatants — was 2,205, according to the UN. That figure is presumably the source of Sanders’ ongoing confusion.





















