Comment by richardfeynman
1 year ago
Great - I'll rely on scientific thinking -- nullius in verba -- and ask questions I'd ask anyone else about how they gather their data, how they know what they claim to know, etc. You believe in the church when it says the sun revolves around the earth.
I don't have the arrogance to assume I can become a domain expert in everything that happens. At the end of the day these people are dead. Killed by Israel. And the world's experts agree. One UN official explained how after previous conflicts they've engaged in post-hoc investigations to ascertain the accuracy of the Gaza health ministry numbers and found them accurate. It's unfortunate for Israel that the numbers make it appear that they're committing a genocide. There are any number of strategies Israel could employ other than indiscriminate mass slaughter. They'd rather deny the numbers than stop incrementing them.
Nobody is asking you to be a domain expert. When it comes to almost any other issue, people ask how and demand evidence. But when it comes to Hamas's claims of a certain number of dead, nobody seems to ask "How do they calculate it? Are they looking at morgue data? Are they doing photographs of mass burial sites, as Ukraine did? What is their method?"
So people are asking you to be scientific and critical rather than to uncritically repeat the claims of a belligerent in combat.
Finally, I'm not sure if you're saying this facetiously or if you genuinely don't know what Israel is capable of, or the lengths its gone to to reduce civilian harm but Israel is not doing indiscriminate mass slaughter. That's what Hamas did on October 7.
Ok, fair. My curiosity about methodology was satisfied when I saw an interview with a UN relief director who explained the retrospective examination of past casualty reporting that had happened.
I mean completely seriously that Israeli occupation forces are engaging in deliberate mass slaughter, including widely reported upon declarations of certain zones as safe for civilians followed by the bombing of those zones (https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-01-03-2024-...).
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