The Media Loves “The Experts,” Until it’s Time to Count Gaza’s Dead

Current Affairs | Lex Syd

Public debate around Gaza fixates on a death toll that is probably half the size of the real number. 

ar from being inflated by sneaky Hamas propagandists, the commonly cited death toll of the war in Gaza is an extreme undercount. 

Virtually every news article about the Israel-Hamas war cites the death toll provided by the strip’s Ministry of Health. Currently at 60,900 (and climbing by the day), the MOH toll is widely accepted as an accurate minimum. Still, journalists and political figures aligned with Israel often call it into question in a range of ways, from attaching the label “Hamas-controlled” to the Ministry itself to outright denying its accuracy. In 2023, even former President Joe Biden invoked this idea, saying that he had “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”

Because the Ministry’s death toll has attracted this undeserved controversy, the standard reporting line is to explain why the MOH figures are considered reliable. For example, the Washington Post recently published a detailed accounting of the names, and in some cases the photos, of roughly 18,500 children who are counted among the dead overall.

But in defending and insisting on the MOH figures, media outlets have defended the bare minimum, and the result is a public debate that revolves around an understated count. Hence why New York Times columnist Bret Stephens can write an opinion piece arguing that 60,000 dead is tragic, but small relative to what Israel could do. Those terms of debate are accepted even by his harshest critics.

But the figure everyone knows is not an undercount of a few thousand or even ten thousand. The real toll could well be twice as high. That is according to a growing body of research that is conspicuously absent in news coverage of Gaza—despite the eagerness of newsrooms to emphasize expert opinion on other divisive topics, like COVID-19 policy or climate change.

The standard figure largely counts only those whose bodies reached health workers and those who were killed violently. But in reality, the institutions that count the dead are heavily degraded, thousands remain under rubble, and deaths due to malnutrition or easily preventable diseases are rarely included in MOH totals, if at all.

How Many Gazans Have Died According to Experts?

A reasonable, conservative estimate of the death toll in Gaza is about 100,000. And the figure may well tally to 200,000, if not now, then by the war’s end. 

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Poor Diet Kills More than Cigarettes?! Key Study Shows We’re Eating Ourselves to Death

Comment: Smoking is the pariah of age and the least of our problems. Stress and poor diet account for a huge, if not most of our deaths in the Western world. 

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Mike Barret
Natural Society

The Western diet is no longer unique to the United States. Many countries the world over have adopted a diet laden with *excess* salt, fat, sugar, and other health-compromising ingredients. Now, people are literally paying for it with their lives, according to a recently published global study. [1]

Researchers looked at the eating habits of people from 195 countries to estimate how much poor diets contribute to mortality. They discovered that 11 million people die each year because they consume too many unhealthy foods and skimp on the healthful ones, like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. 

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The War on Consciousness - Graham Hancock

After Skool

"What is death? Our materialist science reduces everything to matter, materialist science in the West says that we are just meat, we’re just our bodies. So when the brain is dead, that’s the end of consciousness, there is no life after death, there is no soul; we just rot and are gone. Actually, many honest scientists should admit that consciousness is the greatest mystery of science and that we don’t know exactly how it works. The brain is involved in it some way but we’re not sure how. It could be that the brain generates consciousness the way a generator makes electricity, if you hold to that paradigm, then of course you can’t believe in life after death, when the generator’s broken, consciousness is gone. But it’s equally possible that the relationship — and nothing in neuroscience rules it out – that the relationship is more like the relationship of the TV signal to the TV set, and in that case, when the TV set is broken, of course the TV signal continues. 

And this is the paradigm of all spiritual traditions, that we are immortal souls temporarily incarnated in these physical forms. If we want to understand consciousness, the last people we should ask are materialist scientists. Instead, we should look at ancient cultures, like the Egyptians, who highly valued dream states. Many ancient cultures around the world used hallucinogenic plants to understand consciousness and expand their minds. However in today's society, visionary plants are highly illegal because they promote a state of consciousness that does not agree with the agenda of profit.

Substances, like coffee, alcohol, sugar and pharmaceuticals, are forced upon the population, but possession of even small quantities of cannabis, Ayahuasca or psilocybin will land you in jail. If we do not recognize the right of adult sovereignty over consciousness, then we can NOT claim to be free. Look at what our moderns state of consciousness has done. We have destroyed the natural gifts of earth in pursuit of short-term, selfish gain. We must reconnect with spirit immediately or else we will encounter disaster. Visionary plants could be the remedy for our current sickness."