Leftists Seeking to Paper Over the Schisms in the Islamist-Gay Alliance Now Say That Pointing Out that Hamas is Anti-Gay Is Itself "Homophobic"

Stop bringing up relevant information that we are trying to suppress!

End all "Hate Facts"!

Professors claim pointing out how Hamas brutalizes LGBTQ people is 'homophobic violence'

Israel was also accused of committing sexual assault against Palestinians as 'part of the settler colonial White supremacist logics and practices'

Describing Hamas' brutalization of LGBTQ Palestinians needs to be labeled "homophobic violence," university professors suggested at an event last month.

Associate Professor Maya Mikdashi took part in a discussion at the school titled "Palestine is a Feminist and Queer Anti-Imperialist Abolition Struggle" with University of Illinois professor Nadine Naber on March 20. During the event, Mikdashi pushed back on the complaint that Palestinians and Hamas mistreat LGBTQ citizens, claiming that the assertion itself is a form of bigotry.

"So I've been at protests where I'm then told, 'Don't you know what Hamas would do to you, if you were in Palestine.' And we have to start naming this, actually, as homophobic," Mikdashi said, as Naber vocally agreed. "You cannot rehearse violence to queer people and be like, 'don't you know ... A, B, you would be...' in really excruciating detail. I think we have to actually shift it."

"It's violence," an audience member said.

"It's homophobic. It's violent," Mikdashi agreed.

"Homophobic violence," Naber affirmed.

Naber also excused Hamas' gang-rapes of civilians on the grounds that Israel, by simply existing, was guilty of "sexual assault," so this is just rough justice.

Naber also alleged that the concept was based on a "racist assumption" that Arab culture is "hyper-misogynist" and rooted in "backwards or savage concepts." She later insisted that Israel is guilty of sexual assault based on its colonialist founding.

"[I]ndeed the practices of rape and sexual assault that have been well-documented during the founding of Israel and continued today are not an exception or a secondary impact of colonial violence but are part of the settler colonial White supremacist logics and practices of Israel that conflate colonized women with the land and nature and assume that therefore to dominate the land necessitates dominating Palestinian women's bodies and their reproductive capacities from 1948 until today," Naber said.

And you're not going to believe this, but the Gaza Health Ministry, owned and operated by noted Fact-Checking and Disinformation Expert organization Hamas, turns out to have fudged the numbers about claimed casualties.

From FDD:

The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health said on April 6 that it had "incomplete data" for 11,371 of the 33,091 Palestinian fatalities it claims to have documented. In a statistical report, the ministry notes that it considers an individual record to be incomplete if it is missing any of the following key data points: identity number, full name, date of birth, or date of death. The health ministry also released a report on April 3 that acknowledged the presence of incomplete data but did not define what it meant by "incomplete." In that earlier report, the ministry acknowledged the incompleteness of 12,263 records. It is unclear why, after just three more days, the number fell to 11,371 -- a decrease of more than 900 records.

Prior to its admissions of incomplete data, the health ministry asserted that the information in more than 15,000 fatality records had stemmed from "reliable media sources." However, the ministry never identified the sources in question and Gaza has no independent media.

"The sudden shifts in the ministry's reporting methods suggest it is scrambling to prevent exposure of its shoddy work. For months, U.S. media have taken for granted that the ministry's top-line figure for casualties was reliable enough to include in daily updates on the war. Even President Biden has cited its numbers. Now we're seeing that a third or more of the ministry's data may be incomplete at best -- and fictional at worst." -- David Adesnik, Senior Fellow and Director of Research

I mean, this is nonsense -- Hamas isn't guilty of slip-shod record-keeping. They're guilty of just making up numbers completely, as this excellent article at Tablet ably demonstrates.

The number of civilian casualties in Gaza has been at the center of international attention since the start of the war. The main source for the data has been the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which now claims more than 30,000 dead, the majority of which it says are children and women. Recently, the Biden administration lent legitimacy to Hamas' figure. When asked at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week how many Palestinian women and children have been killed since Oct. 7, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the number was "over 25,000." The Pentagon quickly clarified that the secretary "was citing an estimate from the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry." President Biden himself had earlier cited this figure, asserting that "too many, too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children." The White House also explained that the president "was referring to publicly available data about the total number of casualties."

Here's the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.

If Hamas' numbers are faked or fraudulent in some way, there may be evidence in the numbers themselves that can demonstrate it. While there is not much data available, there is a little, and it is enough: From Oct. 26 until Nov. 10, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry released daily casualty figures that include both a total number and a specific number of women and children.

The first place to look is the reported "total" number of deaths. The graph of total deaths by date is increasing with almost metronomical linearity, as the graph in Figure 1 reveals.

The graph reveals an extremely regular increase in casualties over the period. Data aggregated by the author and provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), based on Gaza MoH figures.
The graph reveals an extremely regular increase in casualties over the period. Data aggregated by the author and provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), based on Gaza MoH figures.
This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers.

Another sign of fakery is the lack of correlation between women's deaths and children's deaths. In real mass casualty data, you'd find a correlation between the two, as women and children are often in the same place during a tragedy. But Hamas' fake number generators don't even attempt to keep the numbers consisent with each other.

They similarly don't show a proper correlation between male and female casualty counts. If a bomb hits an apartment building, as Hamas claims happens every other day, then a rougly equal number of men and women will be killed. But Hamas wants to claim that virtually all casualties are women, so they claim that huge numbers of women are being killed, and, on some days, zero men.

Are Israeli bombs hitting all-female religious convents? What can account for these bizarre death statistics, apart from simple fraudulency?

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:30 PM

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