Thomas Wictor

I won’t be buying Max Blumenthal’s The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. It’s a book for cretinous Jew-haters too stupid and passive to think for themselves. Still, it’s fun to debunk the claims that Blumenthal makes.

Full disclosure: He once singled me out on Twitter for some reason.

A “truther” is someone who believes in zany conspiracy theories. The murders of Ismail Bakr, Mohammed Bakr, Ahed Bakr, and Zakaria Bakr were actually part of a very successful military deception (MILDEC) operation. Hamas lured the IDF into firing on a naval compound at the beach in Gaza on July 16, 2014, and the world was fooled. There’s nothing crazy or implausible about it.

If knowing more than Max Blumenthal makes me creepy, so be it.

This is what the publisher says about The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza.

The ensuing conflict led to 51 days of war that left over 2,000 people dead, the vast majority of whom were Palestinian civilians. During the assault, at least 10,000 homes were destroyed and, according to the United Nations, nearly 300,000 Palestinians were displaced. Max Blumenthal was on the ground during what he argues was an entirely avoidable catastrophe. In this explosive work of reportage, Blumenthal reveals the harrowing conditions and cynical deceptions that led to the ruinous war — details that slipped through the cracks of the mainstream media.

Here, for the first time, Blumenthal unearths and presents shocking evidence of atrocities he gathered in the rubble of Gaza after much of the Western media had packed up. He radically shifts the discussion around a number of controversial issues, like the use of civilians as human shields by Israeli forces; the arbitrary targeting of Palestinian civilians; and widespread incitement to genocide by Israeli military personnel, political leaders, and state-sponsored clerics. Blumenthal recorded testimonies from scores of Gazan residents, documenting potential war crimes committed by the Israeli armed forces.

No. There’s no evidence of widespread war crimes, and the majority of the dead were combatants or people who died as a result of everything except Jews. From the New York Times.

Human rights groups acknowledge that people killed by Hamas as collaborators and people who died naturally, or perhaps through domestic violence, are most likely counted as well.

“Most likely”? OF COURSE the Palestinians count all deaths as casualties of the IDF. Why wouldn’t they? Besides, they’ve been caught doing it.

Said to have been killed in 2012 by an Israeli air strike, the child had actually died long ago.

If we look at the The World Factbook by the CIA, we learn that in any fifty-day period in Gaza, 769 people die. Thus we can subtract 769 from the official death toll of 2100 Palestinians. That gives us 1331.

The IDF says it killed 900 terrorists. If we subtract 900 from 1331, we get 431.

According to the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, the IDF killed 504 or 507 children. The list is worthless. For one thing it’s full of terrorists.

Children killed by terrorists are included.

149. Yousef Abdel Rahman Hassouna, 11
150. Mahmoud Hazim Shbeer, 12
151. Ahmed Hazim Shbeer, 10
152. Jamal Salih I’lyan, 8
153. Bara’ Akram Meqdad, 7
154. Mohammed Nahidh Meqdad, 13
155. Ahmed Jaber Washah, 10
156. Mohammed Mahmoud Abu Shaqfeh, 7
157. Mohammed Emad Baroud, 10
158. Mansour Rami Hajjaj, 9

A total of 317 boys and 190 girls are listed. In the 9 to 17 age cohort, twice as many males as females died. Statistically that’s impossible. Therefore I’m going to say that half of the boys were combatants. That’s 159 plus the ten killed by Hamas plus the five terrorists, a total of 174.

We subtract 174 from 431, and we get 257.

Hamas killed 50 protestors and 38 “collaborators,” and Mahmoud Abbas said that Hamas murdered 120 members of Fatah.

Adding the protestors and collaborators to the murdered Fatah members gives us a total of 208.

We subtract 208 from 257, and we get 49.

My own estimate is that another 200 of the “civilian” males are actually terrorists. A total of 347 females versus 1753 males were reported killed. Males outnumbered females by five times, or 500 percent. Therefore even the Palestinians are admitting that the Israelis didn’t use indiscriminate fire, an accusation Max Blumenthal makes.

It’s clear that the ACTUAL number of Palestinian civilians killed by the IDF is in the low double digits, nowhere near 2100. I put it at less than fifty, and those were people deliberately put in harm’s way by terrorists.

A review of The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza tells us more lies that Blumenthal serves up to his imbecilic fans.

During the 51 days of Operation Protective Edge, the Israeli army fired 3 million bullets into the densely populated Gaza Strip—almost two per resident—and dropped around 20,000 tons of explosives, equivalent to one of the atomic bombs dropped by the US on Japan in 1945.

The reviewer is Ben Lorber, Campus Coordinator for Jewish Voice for Peace. Ben is a dummy. First, let’s look at the photo accompanying the review.

See how the roof of the ambulance is blown upward? That means the vehicle was carrying explosive munitions. The IDF targeted the ambulance with a very small missile that had a high-explosive antitank (HEAT) warhead. There are hardly any holes in the vehicle, indicating that it was carrying rocket engines.

And the walls behind the ambulance are pocked with holes from terrorist rockets. The signature is unmistakable. These Palestinians were killed by a terrorist rocket.

At least 875 terrorist rockets landed in Gaza. How many Palestinian civilians did those kill? Two hundred? Three hundred? What are the odds that Max Blumenthal mentioned them in his book?

Now for the lie that Israel used 20,000 tons of high explosives on Gaza, the equivalent of the atomic bomb Fat Man, dropped on Nagasaki, August 9, 1945.

Here’s the total number of targets that the IDF struck during the war.

The largest munition that the IDF has is the MK-84 bomb.

It contains 945 lb (429 kg) of Tritonal high explosive. If Israel dropped an MK-84 on all 5226 targets, it would be a total of only 2613 tons. The figure of 20,000 tons would be an exaggeration by a factor of eight, or 800 percent.

In reality the IDF used AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, M107 155mm artillery rounds, Mikholit missiles, Spike NLOS (non-line of sight) missiles, mortar rounds, and explosive aerial munitions much smaller than the MK-84. I estimate that the IDF used a MAXIMUM of 1000 tons of high explosives. Blumenthal is exaggerating by a factor of twenty, or 2000 percent.

The publisher gushes that Blumenthal is telling his fake atrocity stories for the first time.

No. They were published last year under the clumsily titled “Gruesome tales surface of Israeli massacres against families in Gaza’s Shujaiya neighborhood.” Blumenthal accidentally debunked the lie that an Israeli sniper shot and killed Salem Shemaly.

The family identified his body at the hospital for an NBC News camera crew.

Then they took him home and planted him. However, they told Max that Salem lay in the rubble for several days and got exploded and burned before they went and scooped him up. These two versions of events can’t be reconciled. Though Max exposes the Shemaly family as liars, he didn’t need to. The video put out by the International Solidarity Movement is a stinker. They’re all terrible actors, continuity errors abound, and Salem gets hit in the chest twice but has no wounds.

I always wonder about people who are showered with accolades for lying. Do they ever think that the praise is in any way tainted? After Blumenthal tweeted about me, his followers sent me messages telling me what a loser I am. Here’s a Max-fan.

Here’s another one.

Imagine what it must feel like to know that you appeal only to people like that.