Those looking for specific actions that can be taken to blunt the spread of escalating anti-Semitism got one this week thanks to a prominent famine monitor’s about-face on Gaza. According to the IPC, Gaza is miraculously in much better shape than the organization’s researchers claimed it would be earlier this year.
The IPC’s big fat “never mind” is a good reminder that political leaders presiding over a wave of deadly Jew-hatred, and who are at a loss for how to respond, can start by simply preventing the spread of the kind of intentional, explosive blood libels that feed—and have always fed—mob violence against Jews. That means excluding the IPC’s claims from all policy discussion in the future.
After all, more reliable data sources are available, as the Times of Israel points out. One such source is the Global Nutrition Cluster, “which has found that malnutrition rates never crossed famine levels even in July and August, and actually remained 23 percent under that level even at the peak of food insecurity.”
The IPC, meanwhile, has access to the same data and even uses some GNC data in its Gaza reports “but failed to show the consolidated, weighted data used by that organization.” According to the full data the IPC hid, “malnutrition peaked in July and August, and then steadily improved in September, October and November.”
It’s obviously great news that there was no famine in Gaza. It is terrible news that the organizations responsible for informing the world of such conditions knew the whole time that there was no famine and manipulated data in order to spread false accusations against Israel. The “famine” narrative materially affected the war by convincing supposed members of the democratic alliance to withhold supplies from Israel and force Israel to resupply Hamas, thereby prolonging the war and costing additional Israeli and Palestinian lives. The wider “child killer” narrative, meanwhile, has been part of a global campaign of ever-escalating violence against Jews around the world.
If the objectively false “Israel is deliberately starving babies” narrative never takes hold, the war ends sooner and the Global Intifada is starved of some of its oxygen. It’s a no-brainer, then, that anyone who contributed to the spread of that narrative should be considered outside the bounds of respectable opinion. They can be free to post deranged material to social media just like anybody else, but they should be given no legitimacy by governments and academics and the media.
That last one might be too much to hope for, of course. The Associated Press “report” on the IPC’s acknowledgement of improved conditions in Gaza begins this way: “The spread of famine has been averted in the Gaza Strip, but the situation remains critical with the entire Palestinian territory still facing starvation, the world’s leading authority on food crises said Friday.”
Let’s just be clear: “famine has been averted” is thankfully true of most places in the world today. And if famine was averted, why the passive phrasing? Doesn’t that mean someone was getting food to Gazans even while their own government was hoarding it from them? And wouldn’t that someone be… the State of Israel?
Yes, it would. So here’s what happened: Hamas tried to bring a famine upon the people of Gaza, and Israel (at great risk) made sure to deliver enough food and supplies to stop that from happening even while Gaza’s armed forces remained at war with Israel. In their disappointment that there was no famine, Hamas’s allies in the NGO world pretended there was famine anyway, so that they could also lie about Israel’s efforts to supply Gaza. And a major global news wire rewarded them by telling readers they are the “world’s leading authority on food crises” despite the fact that the lesson of the article is that the IPC cannot be trusted.
The very least politicians can do is ensure that untrustworthy sources have no role in policymaking ever again.
