Israel-bashing: Where logic does not apply

(JNS) — Do you remember when universities were institutions that taught us how to think critically rather than telling us what to think and when journalism schools emphasized ethics and the importance of truth-seeking? If those days ever existed, they seem long gone, particularly regarding coverage of the Middle East.

Amnesty International is mistaken for a human-rights organization when it is nothing more than a media whore engaged in National Enquirer-like sensationalism. It has mastered the art of generating headlines and stirring outrage with incendiary claims about Israel. These allegations aren’t about truth but about grabbing attention and securing donations to perpetuate and justify its existence. Amnesty can count on the media to uncritically parrot whatever conclusions it publishes, no matter how baseless.

The latest example of its deceit is the group’s accusation that Israel is engaged in “genocide,” which predictably provoked unthinking outrage by students, faculty and reporters. The report recycles an absurd charge that was leveled against Israel long before Oct. 7, 2023, and regurgitates it with an equal lack of evidence.

“Genocide” refers to the intentional destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. If Israel were committed to genocide, there would be no Palestinians left—yet we see the Palestinian population has grown significantly over the years, and there is no indication of a systematic effort to exterminate them.

Let’s look at the numbers.

In 1949, Israel’s Muslim population, which is almost entirely Palestinian, was around 112,000, making up less than 10 percent of the population. Today, that figure stands at 2.1 million, or more than 21 percent of the population.

What about the data for the disputed territories?

The accuracy of the population statistics is debated, but for the sake of argument, let’s use data from the United Nations. It indicates the Palestinian population has grown from less than 1.2 million in 1968 to nearly 5.5 million in 2024 — an almost 400 percent increase. How does this align with the claim of genocide?

So much for the pre-Oct. 7 allegations. What about Amnesty’s assertion that Israel is now intent on the destruction of the Palestinian people? You can ignore the rhetoric in the report’s 296 pages and do some basic math.

Like the media, Amnesty International relies on the casualty statistics fabricated by the Hamas-run health ministry. We know with 100 percent certainty that these figures are bogus because they do not distinguish between civilians and terrorists. The agency admitted that it could not determine how many casualties were “fighters” (according to Amnesty, people who massacre Jews cannot be called terrorists).

All journalists know this, and sometimes they note that the data is flawed in passing, but they dispense with the need to investigate by saying the information is unverified. This is one of the many ethical lapses of the media, which is supposed to confirm claims before publishing them as if they are facts.

Still, bizarrely, even as Amnesty International, the media and the Hamas cheerleaders on campus demonize the Israel Defense Forces for its lethality, none acknowledges that their view implies that Israel must simultaneously have the world’s most incompetent army to have fought for more than a year without killing a single combatant.

If we accept Hamas’s claim at face value, as Amnesty did, that 40,717 Palestinians have been killed, we can use elementary-school math to disprove its conclusion. According to most sources, the population of Gaza is more than 2 million. This means that in their supposed genocidal rage over seeing their people massacred and kidnapped, the IDF has killed 2 percent of the population.

Israel estimates that it has killed some 18,000 “fighters” (a figure rarely acknowledged in the Western media), which means the number of civilian dead is still tragic: 22,717. But 99 percent of the population that is not terrorists is still alive. Moreover, the ratio of civilian deaths to combatants is remarkably low when compared to other military conflicts, which is precisely the opposite of the way the conflict has been portrayed. That fact is even more remarkable given that the war has been conducted in a dense urban environment where Hamas has used civilians as human shields.

Israel has not only shown no intent to kill all Palestinians but has also taken exceptional measures to protect them. Of course, Israel is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. According to Amnesty and other critics, it is a crime for Israel to tell civilians to leave their homes to avoid being in harm’s way. If they didn’t provide warnings, then the Israelis would be condemned for that and any concomitant casualties.

Equally unprecedented are the measures Israel has taken to provide humanitarian aid. Criticize the pace and process if you want but name another country intent on genocide that provided food, medicine and shelter to the people it was determined to slaughter.

Equally hypocritical, as The Wall Street Journal noted: “Not one of the groups yelling genocide calls on Egypt to let women and children escape to safety by opening its border with Gaza. Uniquely in this conflict, they insist that civilians be penned in the war zone. They do so because they know there isn’t an Israeli genocide but rather unintended civilian casualties, which can be used against Israel.”

To put this in perspective, compare the figures with real genocides: Cambodia, where 25 percent of the population was killed; Armenia, where more than half of the Armenian population was slaughtered by the Turks; Rwanda, where perhaps as many as 80 percent of the Tutsis were murdered; and Nazi-occupied Europe, where two-thirds of the Jewish population was exterminated.

And it’s not just the press that is incapable of interrogating data and using simple math; students and faculty at our most prestigious universities also suffer from a critical thinking disability.

People worry about how artificial intelligence might endanger us in the future, but Amnesty International is an AI that presents a clear and present threat to the truth and intellectual integrity. It is a malicious actor with an ideological agenda that perpetuates biases through its distortion of data. It is enabled by a gullible, hostile press and ill-informed, mendacious faculty and students.

We must take steps to ensure that the next generation educated in universities and journalism schools learns critical thinking skills to distinguish between truth and falsehood, lest AIs lead us astray.