Andrew Fox: The Numbers Game
Here is my one regret from the last two years of commentary on the 7th October War: we let ourselves get sucked into arguing the running death toll coming out of Hamas’s Health Ministry in Gaza.FBI Thwarts Jihadist Terrorist Attack in Dearborn, Michigan, Planned for Halloween Weekend
In some ways, it was inevitable. Global outlets put those figures in every headline and chyron, so someone had to meet them on the field. Nevertheless, it was still a strategic mistake. We allowed Hamas’s daily ticker to become the global yardstick for morality in this conflict.
Start with a simple truth about war reporting: immediate casualty numbers after explosions are guaranteed to be wrong. These are not fog-of-war errors from Hamas; they are straight-up lies. The Al‑Ahli explosion is a case study. Within minutes, the “500 dead” claim circled the world. Subsequent assessments from Western intelligence agencies put the likely death toll in the low hundreds, yet the first number did its work; it framed the narrative for days. We have seen this ruse time and again, and we fall for it each time it happens.
I am not saying the numbers do not matter at all; every innocent death matters infinitely to the people who loved them. But the “numbers game”, the breathless, running tally, turns a legal and moral analysis into a horse race graphic. It incentivises speed over verification, from a single unverified source with a clear propaganda motive, and it collapses complex questions into a single, unreliable metric. Even organisations and reporters who regard Gaza Health Ministry figures as broadly useful acknowledge the limits of instant counts and the likelihood of later revisions when conditions improve or bodies are recovered from rubble.
Here is the broader point. If the tally is 40,000, 68,000, or 100,000, the fundamental question remains unchanged. In no other conflict do we treat a running counter as the dispositive test of conduct. Afghanistan’s war killed roughly 176,000 people through direct violence by 2021: civilians, Afghan forces, insurgents, and others, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. Iraq’s direct-war deaths from 2003 to 2021 total 275,000–306,000, including 185,000–209,000 civilians. Those wars are debated on strategy, aims, and legality, not by a daily, decontextualised ticker. Nobody alleges those wars were genocides.
Look around the world right now. Amidst the ongoing slaughter of innocents in Sudan, famine has been formally identified, with the UN-backed IPC system projecting expansion absent major relief. In the worst-case scenario, up to one million people could die in Sudan through war, famine, and pestilence. There are no mass marches in Western capitals keyed to that potential number and no live tickers on cable news.
The FBI on Friday foiled a jihadist terrorist plot in Dearborn, Mich., arresting multiple suspects for plotting an ISIS-inspired attack over Halloween weekend.Paddystine’s new president
Authorities "thwarted a Jihadist terror plot stemming from Dearborn earlier this morning—reportedly timed to coincide with children trick-or-treating later tonight," journalist Eitan Fischberger wrote in an X post. FBI director Kash Patel confirmed in a statement on X that officials "thwarted a potential terrorist attack and arrested multiple subjects in Michigan who were allegedly plotting a violent attack over Halloween weekend."
"The plot was inspired by ISIS," CNN reported, citing two law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation.
The suspects discussed the plot in online chatrooms where an undercover FBI agent was present, the officials told CNN. Authorities have arrested two of the participants and are questioning three others.
This is far from the only ISIS-linked terrorist plot on U.S. soil this year. In June, an Afghan national who had pledged allegiance to ISIS pleaded guilty to two terrorism-related offenses. In January, U.S. citizen Shamsud-Din Jabbar killed 15 people and injured dozens more when he drove a pickup truck into a crowd in New Orleans. Jabbar, who died in a shootout with police, had an ISIS flag in his vehicle and pledged allegiance to the group in Facebook videos posted just hours before the attack.
Describing Hamas as “part of the fabric of the Palestinian people,” she is not averse to issuing her own “Paddystinian” statements. “I come from Ireland, which has a history of colonization,” she told the BBC earlier this year. “I would be very wary of telling a sovereign people how to run their country.”
One of the core doctrines of Palestinianism is that “Palestine” is the only issue that matters and that other international crises—from Ukraine to Kurdistan to Sudan—are either politically suspect or simply irrelevant. As Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the Palestinians, expressed it at an Oct. 30 briefing organized by the U.N.’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, “Palestine today is the stage to prove whether or not we will live in a truly decolonized world.” The message sent to the residents of the city of El-Fasher in Sudan, who last week were driven from their homes amid bestial atrocities committed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), as well as to the thousands of Ukrainian children illegally abducted by the Russian invaders, is that they don’t count.
In fact, Russian imperialism is not just exempted. In Connolly’s case, it receives a full-throated endorsement. An uncompromising backer of Irish neutrality that was famously on display during World War II, she opposes greater Irish contributions to the defense of Europe. She has additionally criticized NATO’s eastward expansion, accusing the alliance of playing “a despicable role in moving forward to the border and engaging in war-mongering,” believing that the greatest threat posed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the “militarization” of Europe.
As Rachelle Moiselle, a keen observer of the Irish scene, has observed, Connolly also has a nasty habit of referring to Ukraine as “the Ukraine,” as if the country is a geographical feature rather than an independent state allied with the West. So much, then, for not telling “a sovereign people how to run their country,” unless you believe, as Connolly clearly does, that Ukraine is a province of a Greater Russia.
Perhaps Connolly’s greatest offense was her homage to the now-deposed Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2018. Standing in the rubble of Aleppo, relentlessly bombed by the Russian forces supporting Assad during the civil war, she offered her solidarity to this exemplar of Arab dictators, despite Assad reducing the Palestinian neighborhood of Yarmouk on the outskirts of Damascus from—as one Palestinian witness memorably put it—“a thriving neighborhood of hundreds of thousands of people into a desperate population of 18,000 waiting to die.”
Connolly is unlikely to stick to the traditional role of the Irish president as a figurehead, opting instead for the activist profile adopted by Higgins and first pioneered during the 1990s by Mary Robinson. While the current crop of Western leaders is unlikely to heed her warnings and complaints, she is set to be a major component of the global movement to isolate and weaken the State of Israel.
She will not be alone. Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish Prime Minister, sits in her camp, as will—assuming he wins New York City’s mayoral election—the Hamas shill Zohran Mamdani, to name just two of her erstwhile comrades.
As Israel’s main ally on the world stage, the United States needs to tighten political and economic pressure on Ireland, which, in the estimation of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, “runs a trade surplus at our expense.” As for the American Jewish community, they should steer clear of vacations in Ireland and refrain from buying Irish products. For one thing, it’s not safe to be a Jew there. For another, with Ireland pushing a boycott of Israel, we should have no qualms about urging a boycott of Ireland in response.























