January 28, 2008
Palis Must Consume Half Ton of Flour a Day
Lies, damn lies, and Palestinian statistics! It would be no big deal since thinking people almost never take Palestinian propaganda at face value, but this was run in a Boston Globe editorial today. Martin Kramer notes:
You don't need to be a math genius to figure out that if Gaza has a population of 1.5 million, as the authors also note, then 680,000 tons of flour a day comes out to almost half a ton of flour per Gazan, per day.Read the rest.A typographical error at the Boston Globe? Hardly. The two authors used the same "statistic" in an earlier piece. They copied it from an article published in the Ahram Weekly last November, which reported that "the price of a bag of flour has risen 80 per cent, because of the 680,000 tonnes the Gaza Strip needs daily, only 90 tonnes are permitted to enter." Sarraj and Roy added the bit about this being "a reduction of 99 percent."
Note how an absurd and impossible "statistic" has made its way up the media feeding chain. It begins in an Egyptian newspaper, is cycled through a Palestinian activist, is submitted under the shared byline of a Harvard "research scholar," and finally appears in the Boston Globe, whose editors apparently can't do basic math. Now, in a viral contagion, this spreads across the Internet, where that "reduction of 99 percent" becomes a well-attested fact.
It's a good thing the eeevil Zionists didn't cut off the essential Stay Puft marshmallow supply. Rumor has it that Hamas buys the stuff by the ton for a new WMD they're developing.
