In just two months of fighting in Gaza, Israel launched more drone strikes on Toyotas than the United States did in four years of the American Civil War.
Accurate? Yes. Meaningless? Of course.
The same, and worse, could be said about comparative statistics the Wall Street Journal put before its readers. Last December, reporters Jared Malsin and Saeed Shah contrasted Gaza with Iraq as follows:
An assessment by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that Israel dropped 29,000 weapons on Gaza in a little over two months, according to U.S. officials. By comparison, the U.S. military dropped 3,678 munitions on Iraq from 2004 to 2010, according to the U.S. Central Command.
It’s one thing to compare Israel’s invasion of Gaza in its battle to upend the Hamas regime with the US invasion of Iraq as it fought to overthrow Saddam Hussein. It is another to pretend to do so.
But pretend is what the Wall Street Journal did. The American invasion of Iraq didn’t begin in 2004, the starting date of the Journal’s count. By then, the Baathist regime had been overthrown. Major combat operations had ended. A U.S.-appointed government ruled Iraq. Even Saddam Hussein’s last dominion, a few square feet in a cramped “rat hole” under a home in a small village, from which he ruled over himself alone, was no more.
Rather, the invasion, the shock, and the awe began in March 2003. Three weeks later, the Iraqi regime disintegrated. Three weeks after that, the US announced major combat operations had ended. In the first 30 days of fighting, the American-led forces fired 20,199 munitions into Iraq.
In other words, the US fired the same quantity of munitions Israel is said to have fired, but in half the time. The Wall Street Journal flipped the truth on its head. And it did so by simply ignoring the American air war. And the ground war.
There is nothing to stop a polemicist from comparing an insurgency — the state of affairs in Iraq from 2004 to 2010 — to Israel’s town-by-town invasion of Gaza. But to do so, as the Journal does, is more than meaningless. It is egregiously dishonest.
Elsewhere in the piece, the authors claim that “Nearly 70% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes and about half of its buildings have been damaged or destroyed.”
Here, too, data is misleadingly cherry-picked — this time to exclude, and effectively conceal, much lower professional assessments.
The Journal seems to have relied solely on an estimate by researchers Corey Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek. But the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) also released data, both shortly before and shortly after the publication of the Wall Street Journal piece, about damage to Gaza infrastructure. In contrast with the 307,000 homes the Journal claims were damaged or destroyed, UNOSAT calculated
- 37,379 damaged or destroyed structures (of any type) as of November 26; and
- 69,146 structures, including “93,800 estimated damaged housing units,” as of January 7th. The latter number amounts to roughly 22 percent, not 70 percent, of the Gaza Strip’s housing stock.
Why did the newspaper ignore these numbers? Not because it doesn’t find UNOSAT credible —the Journal has frequently cited UNOSAT damage assessments in past reporting. The more likely answer, then, is that the lower figures were inconvenient to newspaper’s desired narrative.
Cherry-picking and chronological trickery isn’t how journalism works. Not good journalism, at least. But as CAMERA has previously documented, the Wall Street Journal is far from the only outlet to brazenly manipulate statistics in recent months. The examples are worth revisiting:
To help make the case that the Gaza war “has been unlike any other in the 21st century,” the Washington Post compared the number of munitions dropped in Gaza to the relatively limited 2014 Iraq war, but ignored the 2003 Iraq war whose pace of bombing, as noted above, far exceeded that in Gaza.
The Associated Press made the same comparison, and the same elision.
The Lawfare blog compared 29,000 bombs Israel dropped on Gaza “during the first six weeks of war” to the 29,199 the US dropped “during the entire Iraq war in 2003.” As mentioned, the “entirety” of the Iraq war they describe was a good deal less than six weeks.
Instead of munitions, the New York Times compared casualties “in less than two months” in Gaza to the 7,700 civilians killed by US-led forces “in the entire first year” of the 2003 war. But as with munitions, so were casualties — an overwhelming majority of the newspaper’s number was killed in the few weeks of invasion phase.
The Washington Post reported that while Israel dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza in the days after the Hamas attack, “the highest number of bombs and other munitions dropped in one year during the war in Afghanistan was just over 7,423.” In fact, the US dropped 17,500 munitions in just 76 days of war.
The New York Times once claimed that “Gazan civilians are dying at a faster rate than civilians did during the most intense US attacks in Afghanistan or Iraq.” They were not.
It announced that “Israel has killed more women and children than have been killed in Ukraine,” but relied on figures for Ukraine that were, according to the source of the figures, a “considerable” undercount.
The Wall Street Journal piece discussed above had also included a wildly exaggerated map of destruction in Gaza.
The Associated Press took Scher and Van Den Hoek’s estimate of “likely damaged or destroyed structures” and described them all as “destroyed” structures.
A New York Times headline announced that Gaza deaths surpassed “any Arab war losses in 40 years.” It certainly had not.
The Washington Post claimed displacement in Gaza was “the largest” in the regions since 1948. It certainly was not.
Some of the above distortions have been corrected. Some remain unchanged. Others we haven’t listed above. Regardless, the pattern is clear — and should be disturbing to all who hope for an honest, impartial, and informative news media.