Joe Biden will not be the Democratic nominee in November’s presidential election, thankfully. He is not withdrawing because he’s being held responsible for enabling war crimes against the Palestinian people (though a recent poll does have nearly 40 percent of Americans saying they’re less likely to vote for him thanks to his handling of the war). Yet it’s impossible to extricate the collapse in public faith in the Biden campaign from the “uncommitted” movement for Gaza. They were the first people to refuse him their votes, and defections from within the president’s base hollowed out his support well in advance of the debate.
The Democrats and their presumptive nominee Kamala Harris are faced with a choice: On the one hand, they can continue Biden’s monstrous support for Netanyahu, the brutal IDF, and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. That would help allow the party to cover for Biden and put a positive spin on a smooth handoff, even though we all know this would mainly benefit the embittered president himself and his small coterie of loyalists. Such a choice would confirm that the institutional rot that allowed the current situation to develop still characterizes the party.
If you want to compare casualties then you need to compare the same periods. The average monthly casualties for the period we had data was far higher than the war on Iraq. Which is kind of to be expected since we were there for 10 years. It’s also a much larger country with more people exposed to proportionally larger forces fighting.
So let’s do this the right way. According to the Iraqi Body Count project around 200,000 civilians were killed. Or 0.8 percent of civilians in Iraq. In Gaza that number is 2 percent. More than double. And that’s just the bodies that made it to a morgue while the health ministry was still capable of accurately counting bodies. Estimates of people who are missing, presumed dead, under the rubble are in the six figure range. So let’s be generous and set the total at 100,000, so 60k under rubble, far below the estimates. That’s 5 percent of the civilian population dead.
This is not a road you want to go down. Any analysis beyond the most shallow reflects extremely poorly on Israel.
Percentage of the total population is a bad stat, a dead person regardless of how many people you started with.
The point I was trying to make is that the US is clearly okay with killing civilians.
Right. Those two ratios are clearly the mark of countries with the same attitude towards civilian deaths.
If you only murder one person, does it not matter?
Death percentages do not matter to the families involved.
Ahh yes we’re all in hell so why not commit a little genocide? As a treat!
All I’m saying is that the US citizenry was almost totally fine with the civilian deaths after 9/11, there were only a handful of protests in the US and a lot more support for that war than not (at the time).
If they had attacked and killed 1000 Americans on Oct 7th, there would be far more dead Palestinians, and zero university encampments.
Just how would there be more? What evidence do you have for that?
The evidence is 9/11, the US got attacked, lost almost 2000 people, and they killed around a half million civilians during the resulting fighting.
Oh you think we’re far enough down the thread, I forgot we covered this already?
0.8 percent. Versus between 2 and 5 percent, generously. I can put it into per 100,000 for you if you like.