In today’s Jerusalem Post Bernie Sanders, extracted from a long Rolling Stone article, takes a swing at Jews for defending ourselves. Obviously he picks a scape goat Jew, our Prime Minister no less.
“I believe in a two-state solution, where Israel has security and the Palestinians have a state of their own,” he told Rolling Stone. “The United States has got to work with the Palestinian people in improving their standard of living, which is now a disaster, and has been made much worse since the war in Gaza.
“When reminded that he once said he wasn’t a “fan” of the Israeli prime minister, Sanders remarked that he believed Israel went too far in inflicting devastation on the Gaza Strip last summer.
“War is terrible unto itself,” the Vermont senator is quoted as saying. “But I think that Israel overreacted and caused more civilian damage than was necessary. They have very sophisticated weapons systems. They make the case, and I respect that, that they do try to make sure that civilians are not damaged. But the end result was that a lot of civilians were killed and a lot of housing was destroyed. There was terrible, terrible damage done.”
Time to remind people of Judge Dan’s epic work analysing the UN’s own damage assessment details from 2014. He clearly showed quite how amazing the IDF targeting was. Yes, parts of Gaza were rubbilized but these were areas out of which Hamas were indiscriminently firing rockets on my family and millions of other Israeli civilians.
Assessing The UN’s OCHA “Gaza Crisis Atlas 2014” Report
It now becomes very clearthat most of the damage was caused to 5 locations right on the border with Israel. The rest of the Gaza Strip was, for the most part, undamaged. The main population areas of Gaza city, Jabaliya, Khan Yunes, Rafah and Deir el-Balahwere disproportionately undamaged.
If we do a rough estimate of the damage area, it is once again clear the vast majority of the Gaza Strip was unscathed. With a fairly generous estimation that a damage point has a 25 meter radius – the footprint of a house, or the blast radius of a bomb – the total damage area of the 12,433 impacts was in the order of 15 KM2. The land area of the Gaza strip is 360 Km2. In other words, less than 5% of the land was affected.
Further Analysis Of “Gaza Crisis Atlas 2014” Damage Clusters
Right now Russia is deploying the largest bombers in the world in Syria. It doesn’t appear that anybody with a loud voice is on the ground checking who’s under the falling bombs.
The Saudis and others have been bombing Yemen back into the stone age for months. The UN has produced pretty infographics that hardly anybody noticed. Rolling Stone has a long article but of course even they wouldn’t bother to ask Sanders anything about the US support for the Saudis.
The headline is that the civilian to combatant death ratio in Yemen under (American supported) Saudi bombs is probably 5 to 1. Five civilians killed for every valid combatant.
In Israellycool’s groundbreaking early analysis of the real calculation of civilians killed in Gaza we clearly showed the ratio was closer to 1 to 1 and this was born out by all reasonable studies after the war. By reasonable I mean any study that didn’t just believe the lies fed to them by the Hamas “Health Ministry”.
And yesterday the French Police expended 5000 rounds of ammunition on one apartment near Paris and is still struggling to work out not just who they killed, but how many people!
But the problem is bigger than one misinformed, uninformed US aspiring Presidential candidate. Sanders was just expressing prevailing views that have been carefully formed by a corrupt and dangerous media, populated by lethal journalists whose messages Israel does not know how to counter effectively.
