Here’s yesterday’s video for SouthFront. Click to connect. I needed a VPN to connect to this one since the url was blocked in Japan.
There are a few points here.
The “official death toll” is 65,000. This is the figure usually reported in the MSM based on the figure reported by the Gazan Ministry of Health and refers to “direct”, “conflict related deaths” – bullets and bombs.
However, with Gaza’s infrastructure destroyed, medical personnel killed and virtually no functioning healthcare system, many deaths go unrecorded or undocumented.
Thousands of bodies are believed to be buried under destroyed buildings and there is no working system that can track deaths from disease and malnutrition . Keep in mind that over 70% are women and children.
So what the Lancet calls “indirect deaths” or “excess mortality”’may be as much as 4 times higher than the “official numbers.
The Lancet has done extensive studies. The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Johns Hopkins University have also tried to model these deaths. But there is widespread disagreement because no one can really know.
The most conservative estimate I have seen was 85,000— but that was June 2024 —and calculating forward the number should have reached 120,000 to 150,000 by now.
So...somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000. 70% women and children .
The population of Gaza is just over 2 million. So, if the death toll were 200,000 that would be roughly 10% of the population. Now, in the case of the US, the total population is 330 million so, 10% would be…:? 33 million… And half that…?
Who would dispute Genocide?
No matter how you calculate, it’s not numbers that matter, however — you cannot quantify human suffering.
Morality cannot be reduced to mathematics.
The wonderful Alastair Crooke writes about the moral issues as they affect Israel , quoting Israeli filmmaker.
Israeli filmmaker Neta Shoshani’s controversial documentary about the 1948 war was banned in Israel because it exposed many of the flaws in the ethos underlying the creation of the nascent State’s identity.
Shoshani wrote recently about her film, “I suddenly realized that in the past two horrible years the whole matter of the Israeli ethos has been totally shattered”:
“I grasped that an ethos has a great deal of power, that it contains society within certain boundaries. And even if those boundaries are breached – and they were certainly breached as early as 1948 – there was still something in society’s moral codes that at least caused it to feel ashamed. So for decades that ethos safeguarded [Israeli] society and the army, compelling them to preserve certain limits”.
“And when that ethos falls apart, it’s really scary. From this perspective, the film was difficult to watch from the get-go, but after the last two years it’s become unbearable” …
“If 1948 Was a War of Independence, the current war could be the one that ends Israel”.
Shosani’s warning that when a society’s ethical boundaries are erased in a bout of bloodletting (as they were in 1948), this loss of ethos structure can imperil the legitimacy of the entire project – leading to self-destruction as the state traverses all human limits.
“Ethos” is one of Aristotle’s three “proofs” of persuasion, the other two being “logos” (logic, reason) and “pathos”(feeling, emotion). They are basic to more than “rhetoric”— they are the core of both individual and social being.
In my upcoming book / article on the demise of Western civilization I use this interpretation as primary —since, for me, conscience, principles, justice — the whole basket of moral things passed on from parent to child—is “proof” of a society’s right to exist generating the logic of a culture and its emotional content.
“Ethos” frames validity.
In these terms, Israel has no right to exist. It fails the basic “proof”. of legitimacy,as Crooke says.
But the same can be said of the US of A. It too is illegitimate. Just another bastard of Empire.
Coffee instead of Substack Paid Subscriptions
My supervisor tonight was Dr. Ichi. Who, by the way, has REAL ethos!
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@Julian, what are your thoughts on Venezuela and the F35 pestering there?
The Jewish state will carry the stain of what they have done for all of history.
Mark Vossler MD