Letter: Garbage In. Garbage Out.

Dear editor:

Bruce Ticker writes “74,000 deaths…provided by the Hamas controlled health ministry.” (“Column: The Prime Minister’s U.N. Speech Does Not Help American Jews,” BJN 10/1/26) Yes. Garbage in. Garbage out.

As esteemed Holocaust scholar Rafael Medoff has recently written:

“The first problem with the casualty numbers was their source. Although news reports frequently stated that “the Gaza Health Ministry” or “the health authorities in Gaza” provided the figures, the numbers came from the HAMAS health ministry – that is, a division of a terrorist group with a long track record of lying about everything from the outcome of its terrorist attacks (inflating the number of Israeli victims, characterizing defenseless Israeli victims as soldiers, and the like) to topics such as The Holocaust, which it calls a hoax, and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which it calls genuine. It also has an obviously strong interest in artificially inflating the numbers in order to increase international criticism of Israel. (See: “The Road to October 7. Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews“, Rafael Medoff, 2025,  pp 111-112).

See also: “How the Gaza Health Ministry Fakes Casualty Numbers. The Evidence is in Their Own Poorly Fabricated Numbers“, Abraham Wyner, Professor of Statistics and Data Science at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Tablet Magazine, 3/6/24.

Using Gaza Health Ministry casualty statistics for ANYTHING is the ultimate example of garbage in, garbage out; when it comes to promoting these endless statistical calumnies against the Jewish people of Israel, garbage in, garbage out is obviously the journalistic and political foundation of everyone of Israel’s critics from The New York Times to The Guardian and all the Zionophobic candidates that they support including Mayor Mamdani and Abdul el- Sayed.

To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, you can lead Israel’s Zionophobic critics to the truth about Hamas, but you can’t make them think.

Richard Sherman
Margate, Florida 
Member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism