Wednesday, October 17, 2018
Google the phrase “arab infant
mortality rate” and step into Wonderland gone wrong. The featured snippet is from a Times of Israel piece: “In Israel,
infant mortality rate 3 times higher among Arabs.” Based on the title alone,
without further investigation, who wouldn’t curse a blue streak, damning Israel
to hell for its villainy against the Arab people—damning Israelis as baby
killers?
Unless you were a thinking
person, that is, who knows better than to accept what the Times of Israel wants you to believe about the disparity between
the Arab and Israeli infant mortality rates. If you were a thinking person, you’d
look to confirm the statistic. And assuming it were true, well then you’d want
to know the context.
But of course, it’s ever so
much easier to blame Israel. Or alternatively, the “occupation,” another thing you
might read about in the media and accept as true without a second thought.
After all, you think, a news site wouldn’t print something untrue. They’d get
caught. They’d lose credibility, you are sure. And so you believe what you
read.
That’s if you’re a regular joe.
But what if you were someone who lived in the ivory towers of academia? Someone
with a higher education who had successfully defended a PhD thesis, someone
entrusted with teaching young students. Wouldn’t such a person know better than
to accept at face value what he or she reads in the news?
Wouldn’t a college professor be
aware, when reading a title like that in the Times of Israel, or a similar one in Haaretz, “Huge disparities between Israeli Palestinian health
systems,” that media bias may be in play here? When the title contains such a
glaring smear, thinking people are supposed to stop short and think: wait a
second—is that really the whole story?
Often it is not. As in this
case. But we’ll get to that in a minute.
Two University of Michigan staff
members are currently in the news for refusing
to write recommendations for students hoping to study in Israel. TA Lucy
Peterson and Prof. John Cheney-Lippold both originally agreed to write recommendations
and then changed their minds, saying they were committed to the academic
boycott of Israel. Cheney-Lippold also cited the infant mortality rate
disparity, “linking it to Apartheid,” according to writer Rob Shimshock in Campus Unmasked. Shimshock asks,
“Does that mean America is also an apartheid state? That black infant mortality
rate is nearly three times higher than the Asian one.”
This is a good question. And
actually, it gets pretty close to the heart of the matter, namely that a
disparity in infant mortality rates doesn’t mean that one sector is victimizing
the other. (This is similar to the dumb idea of proportionality as applied to
the Gaza border riots: if more Arabs are dying than Israelis, then Israel must
be the big bad wolf. No one stops to think that if violent Arabs would only
stop rushing the border with explosives, the IDF wouldn’t be forced to kill
them. No one thinks about the fact that Israel is minding its own business but
these Arabs are rushing to become martyrs and draw pay-to-slay stipends from their
government. Oh no, the world thinks, it takes two to tango, and if so many
Arabs are dying and so many Israelis are not, then we know who is in the wrong!
Things will only be fair when more Jews DIE! So says Europe, the UN, et al.)
Since Peterson and
Cheney-Lippold first agreed to the recommendations and then backed off, giving
the same reason for their refusal, one has to assume that someone got to them.
Someone recited a lot of crap about Israel at them and they swallowed it whole
without bothering to check whether or not the tales had merit. Who knows why
they believed what they were told? Perhaps they were frightened. But a closer
look at the facts would have yielded a quite different picture of Israel, in
particular as regards the disparity in the Arab infant mortality rate.
In a 2014 Ynet piece, Yaron Kelner writes:
The reason for the gap, according to Health Ministry
officials, is the high rate of congenital defects and genetic diseases among
babies in the Arab population. One of the main reasons for that is cousin marriages.
Another reason is that Arab parents tend not to terminate the
pregnancy in case of a defect or disease detected in the fetus.
In addition, Arab women usually give birth at a very early
age (below 20), and are therefore more prone to complications compared to
Jewish women.
The report states that narrowing
the gap between Jews and Arabs is one of the Ministry's main tasks. (emphasis
added)
"We encourage the Arab population to take folic acid
which helps prevent congenital defects, and in (the southern predominantly
Bedouin city of) Rahat we subsidize the addition of folic acid in
bakeries," said Prof. Itamar Grotto, head of public health disease
prevention and health promotion at the Health Ministry.
"In addition, several vaccinations have been added to
the health basket in recent years, and the response in the Arab population has
been very high. We expect it to reduce the mortality rate."
To summarize, the factors that
have tripled the Arab infant mortality rate in comparison with that of Jewish
Israelis are Arab consanguinity; the Arab refusal to terminate pregnancies gone
wrong; and the Arab propensity for marrying off underage girls, which dooms
them to high risk pregnancies. In other words, it is the Arabs who are
responsible for the disparity in Israel’s mortality rates. Far from being the
villain in the story, Israel’s health ministry has tasked itself with
addressing the disparity through measures offered only to the Arab population
such as adding folic acid to baked goods produced in the Bedouin-only town of
Rahat. Folic acid, taken during pregnancy, is known to prevent neural tube
defects. But if Mohammed won’t come to the mountain, and Arab women won’t take
supplements, the supplements come to them, courtesy of the Israeli government.
They get the goodness baked straight into their baked goods.
Israel is actually protecting
Arab pregnancies, ensuring that Arab babies live (to grow up and hate the Jews,
in all too many cases).
But this too, is not the whole
story. The Arab mortality rate has well nigh plummeted since the Six-Day War in
1967. But don’t take it from me. Take it from Al-Najah University's Dr. Wael R.
Ennab, a consultant with UNCTAD.
According to Ennab, in a paper he published in 1994,
the Arab infant mortality rate in 1967 was between 152-162 per 1,000 live
births. By 1974, infant mortality had seen a slight improvement of 132 per
1,000 live births. By 1985 the infant mortality rate had dropped to an
incredible 53-56 per 1,000 live births. And by the time the Oslo Accords were
signed, in 1993, the infant mortality rate had dropped to 30.
This is not the end of the
story. By 2002, the rate had dropped to 25. But as you can see in the
screenshot of the Times of Israel
snippet that accompanies this piece, by 2014, the rate was just “6.4 deaths per
1,000 live births.”
That’s flipping INCREDIBLE.
That is what Israel has accomplished for its Arab population. Even though Israel is
demonized by the whole world as some kind of monster, a baby-killer who oppresses
the Arab people. Even as we have Arabs attacking us in malls, on buses, and in
the streets. With rocks, knives, car-rammings, bombs, axes, Molotov balloons,
and missiles. Still, the Israeli government has fought to drop the Arab
mortality rate from 152-162 to just 6.4 deaths per 1,000 live births in the 51 years
since we won the war.
That’s on us. On Israel!
And it’s on you if you report
that out of context. Or believe the lie that Israel is the villain, when
actually, Israel is the hero in the story of Arab infant mortality.
You don’t have to believe what you
read.
It’s a choice.
Especially when you’re a
Cheney-Lippold or a Peterson. Someone with a higher education.
Someone responsible for young
minds.
It’s a choice to accept the
stats without context and to regurgitate them to your students. To use them to
hurt and wound. To demonize the hero.
This is an evil of great
proportions. A lie that covers an uncommon good in our contemporary world: the
good of Israel and its exceptionally good governance.
Here is the truth: The Jewish
State deserves the widest recognition possible for protecting and nurturing its
largest minority population, a sector that is overwhelmingly hostile to Israel
and the Jewish people. Israel’s methodology for lowering the Arab population’s infant
mortality rate is one that might well be emulated throughout the Arab world and
studied in the halls of academia.
If only we could find an honest
teacher.
(h/t to Arthur Toporovsky for questioning whether the mortality rate
was really triple, and to Dov Epstein for finding me the trail that led to Ennab’s
paper.)
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