By Seth Mandel
Monday, December 22, 2025
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment