Ralph Nader: Massa Media is MythCounting the No. of Humans Murdered by Israel to Minimize Palestinian Lives and Accountability for Its Barbarism. Death Toll Closer to 1M, Contrary to Myth-Information

ACCORDING TO FUNKTIONARY:

mythematician – a social engineer who uses statistics to support unfounded and empirically-invalid conclusions for socioeconomic or political motives, e.g., Eugenics, the “Bell Curve,” I.Q. Tests, etc. (See: Mythmatic & The “Bell Curve”)

mythematics – the manipulation of statistics to formulate and reflect the validity a preconceived desired result or position in an academic and/or socio-political context. (See: Statistics)

Newspapers – thought pollution. People who don’t read newspapers are probably much better off than those who do—as it is better to be uninformed than it is to be either misinformed or myth-informed. Newspapers everywhere, cluttered all around us up to our knees, we’re all suffering from this chronicle disease. “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” ~Malcolm X. (See: Misinformation, Clutter, Propaganda, MEDIA, Predictive Programming, Opinion, Bias & Modern Newspapers)

CONTRARY TO MEDIA MYTH-INFORMATION From [Ralph Nader] Ben Hubbard, the long-time Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, is known for his high standards. So too is Karen DeYoung, the long-time reporter and foreign affairs editor for the Washington Post.

Yet they, and their editors, share a common, recurring failure by misleading their readers about the serious undercount of Palestinian deaths during the Israeli regime’s genocidal destruction of Gaza.

How so? By repeating in article after article the Hamas claim of 67,000 deaths since October 2023. The real death toll estimate is probably around 600,000. Unlike Israeli and American cultures, which do not under-estimate their fatalities in conflicts, Hamas sees the awful death toll as a reflection of their not protecting their people and a measure of Israeli military might against Hamas’ limited small arms and weapons. Both Hubbard and DeYoung, of course, know better. They know the daily bombardment of tiny Gaza, the geographical size of Philadelphia, with 2.3 million humans, is without precedent in Israel’s targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. The blockade of “food, water, medicine, fuel, and electricity,” along with the concentrated destruction of health care facilities have been condemned by human rights groups in Israel and International humanitarian organizations.

 Reporters and editors are quite aware of more accurate casualty estimates appearing in The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, and estimates provided by other academic and prominent international relief organizations like Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, UN World Food Programme and others experienced in assessing the human toll of military devastations.

Journalists know the estimate last April by Professor Emeritus Paul Rogers of the University of Bradford in the UK, an expert in the power of aerial bombs and missiles, who wrote that the TNT equivalent of six Hiroshima atomic bombs has been delivered to these totally defenseless Palestinians, almost all of whom are without housing or air raid shelters.

Netanyahu’s American-made missiles and bombs continue to produce deadly bloodshed.  The waves of death from starvation, untreated, weaponry-caused infectious diseases, the cutoff of medicines treating cancer, respiratory ailments, and diabetes are still mounting.

What readers do not know is how much of the use of Hamas’s undercount is mandated by news editors, and why.  Because intense Netanyahu propaganda has declared the estimates of Hamas, based on real names (excluding many thousands under the rubble and the collateral damage to civilians that in such conflicts exceed direct fatalities from the bombing by 3 to 13-fold), are an exaggeration, the mainstream media is wary of being accused of even worse fabrications than those of Hamas.

Speaking to many reporters and editors about this huge undercount phenomenon, not prevalent in other violent arenas of war, they all agree that the real count is much higher, but they do not have a number to use that is deemed credible. But they do have casualty experts who can be interviewed, such as the chair of the Global Health Department at Edinburgh University or a foremost missile technology specialist, MIT Professor Emeritus Theodore Postol, who said on our radio/podcast recently, “I would say that 200, 300, or 400,000 people [Palestinian] are dead easily.”

The least the journalists could do is say “the real count may be much higher.” The other alternative is to do their own investigation, piecing together the empirical and clinical evidence (See, Gaza Healthcare Letter to President Trump, October 1, 2025) and citing prominent Israelis who have said that the IDF has always targeted Palestinian civilians from 1948 on. (See my column March 28, 2025 – The Vast Gaza Death Undercount – Undermines Civic, Diplomatic and Political Pressures.)

The other alternative is to do a “news analysis,” which allows for evaluations, short of editorializing. For instance, a “news analysis” could point out that conveying the impression that the Hamas figures are the true count means that 97 out of 100 Palestinians in Gaza are still living. This is not remotely credible. Yet that is essentially what Ben Hubbard’s October 7th Times article stated, “with more than 67,000 killed, or one in every 34 Gazans, according to local health officials.”  It is more like one in every four Gazans killed. [MORE]

As of mid-April 2025, University of Bradford (U.K.) Emeritus Professors Paul Rogers, a specialist on aerial and artillery bomb devastation, described the level of destruction in totally besieged Gaza as the “equivalent of six Hiroshimas, but even more destructive” because many more of the bombs over Gaza drop over targeted locations – schools, apartment buildings, hospitals, clinics, markets, refugee encampments, roads, water mains, electricity circuits and even the agricultural areas to deny the people of Gaza from growing some of their own food. Starvation, death by uncontrolled fires, infections, and the thousands of babies born into the rubble each month spiral the daily accelerating toll. Now, if you take the current Hamas figure of just over 62,000, you are telling the public that 97% of Gazans are still alive. [MORE]