[Adam:] For a bit of a primer on top-level Western attitudes towards Palestine, let’s consider a statement made by former President Joe Biden. In late October of 2023, just a few weeks after October 7, then-President Joe Biden stated at a White House news conference that he didn’t trust the death toll numbers coming from the Gaza Health Ministry. Here’s a clip.

[Begin clip]

Joe Biden: I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s a price of waging a war. But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.

[End clip]

Adam: So this was shocking to many human-rights and humanitarian groups as well as Palestinian groups, because the US State Department had been using the Gaza Health Ministry death figures from all previous conflicts, and studies showed that they only veered from the actual official Israeli death tolls by 4 to 7%. So the idea that the Gaza health ministry statistics were off was something that was just invented in mid- to late October by pro-Israel propagandists and echoed by the president himself. Now, again, these are numbers that have been used by the US State Department, by Human Rights Watch, by independent groups for years. Everybody knew, if they were anything, they were a huge undercount.

But quickly after the Al-Ahli Hospital bombing on October 17, 2023, which initially was reported as an Israeli bombing, which it was. The nature of the bombing, it may have been a shelling versus an airstrike, but the crybully campaign emerged to sort of claim pro-Palestinian bias in the part of US media, they sort of believe the Hamas-run officials in Gaza and that this was journalistically discrediting. Now, of course, it’s unclear why repeating, they repeated it with attribution, they said, according to Gaza Health Ministry officials, but this wasn’t sufficient for the ADL and other crybully or pressure groups who said, No, you have to call it the Hamas-run Health Ministry, or Hamas-run government. The obvious implication being, is that they’re just a bunch of cartoon terrorists and they can’t be trusted.

So then that subsequent crybully campaign introduced a new term, which was used propagandistically by every major outlet, the quote-unquote, “Hamas-run” Health Ministry. This was a way of vaguely casting aspersions on the death tolls that were coming out daily, and including, of course, the total death toll. One study shows that “Hamas-run” in the New York Times returns about 500 results. “Israeli-run” generates only 38. One study we did of cable news found that, prior to October 17, 2023 when the Al-Ahli Hospital was bombed and that whole fake controversy about it being a errant PIJ rocket, which it wasn’t, the term ‘Hamas-run’ had never been used prior to October 17 by CNN or MSNBC, not once. But after October 17, in a 100-day survey period, CNN used the term ‘Hamas-run’ 247 times, and MSNBC used it 137 times. So that crybullying campaign worked. But the point, of course, is to say, You can’t really trust these numbers. Palestinians are inherently shifty. They’re inherently untrustworthy. The implication, and sometimes the explicit claim, was that high death tolls are actually what Hamas wants, that they’re kind of a nihilistic, mindless jihadist death cult that is alien to the native population in Gaza, sort of separate from them, infiltrates their communities undercover, and seeks out their death and destruction to sort of garner Western sympathy.