Counting Up The Bodies, Part Two

I thought that I would want to rant on about the “Body Count” ‘study’ at greater length, but really, I find there isn’t much to say. It’s a strange piece of non-history, produced by someone who apparently does work as a professional in the field. It was produced for a religious institute, and it has one clear purpose—to insist in a scientific-sounding way that Christianity is violent and Islam is not. This is not, of course, just an attempt to bash Christianity, it’s an attempt to defend Islam. “Body Count”, has its anti-Muslim counterparts. (Include Links). Similarly decontextualized and badly researched, these documents insist that the history of Islam is not only a single wash of blood, but that it was inevitably and intentionally so from the beginning, and that it is worse, absolutely worse, than any of the (now conveniently whitewashed) things carried out in Christianity’s name, let alone that of any other religion. Absolutist positions lead to absolute nonsense, and any semblance of truth lies somewhere between “Islam is the single worst thing ever to happen to the human race” and “Islam is a religion of peace which has only been misinterpreted by anyone who ever did anything bad in its name”. And both those arguments are being laid out, repeatedly, by people who really ought to know better. You can’t understand either the past or the present like that. The average Tumblr blogger forwarding Naveed Sheikh’s pointless pie charts does so, I think, out of a worthy motivation. They believe, with some reason on their side, that Islam, and Muslims, are being falsely portrayed in the West as mindlessly and essentially violent. These numbers, unexamined, seem to offer a counter to that. They hand the pie charts on, believing they’ve done something useful. I would argue that they’re not; they’re merely contributing to an already worrying pile of bad, partisan history. In the past few years I’ve debated history with people who dismiss the Transatlantic slave trade as the sole responsibility of Muslims, who insist that Jews are not actually Semites, who think that Palestine was an independent nation before the Zionist conquest, who claim that the Serbs who carried out genocide in Bosnia were simply protecting themselves from the Islamist menace…it’s all out there, being eagerly passed from site to site, a barrage of lies and half-truths and obsessive reinterpretations. Perhaps the most cloying form of the unwinnable argument is the ongoing quarrel about whether Christendom or Islam was better (or worse) for the Jews. Despite the inarguable fact that Jews lived in both ‘civilizations’ as outsiders and social inferiors, were sometimes tolerated, sometimes allowed a measure of safety and prosperity, and sometimes slaughtered, people will argue fiercely for their home team’s treatment of the Jews, firmly brushing aside evidence against their case, and highlighting the most inane proofs in their favor. I’ve had people explain to me quite seriously that anti-Semitism was introduced to Europeans by Arabs, and other people explain that it was introduced to Arabs by Europeans. And I’m tired of it, I’m bored with the bad history, the ignorance and the illogic. Naveed Sheikh is not helping, and neither is anyone who forwards his pretty numbers on, without checking their source or understanding their agenda.

Adding Up The Death Toll

Over at Popular Resistance, Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh of Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities is supporting Mahmoud Abbas as he speaks in front of the UN to ask for a Palestinian state to be recognized. The professor is not as pleased with Netanyahu's speech, commenting that he was "just amazed at how many lies can be packed in one speech".

He then posts an extensive chart, meant to show the imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians. I don't plan to cover all of this, or go into it too extensively (for example, under the precise term "Nature" we get Colonizer/Occuper vs. Occupied People, a lie too big to be unpacked in a blog post. This section, however, caught my eye:

All values show for Israel first, then the Palestinians
Casualties (63 years), 6000 killed/75,000 killed, 20,000 injured/300,000 injured
Abducted/jailed30/400,000
Homes demolished 0/50,000
Refugees created 0/>6 million people

And it occurs to me, looking at this, that it represents a number of the things that are wrong and false with the way that the conflict is discussed by those who hate Israel. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a professor at Birzeit University, but I was a history major, and I like to think, something of a critical thinker, and my alarm bells are going off as I look at this.

I think I'm going to need to break this down into three separate posts, so let's start today with the casualties. This chart does not indicate a divide between military, civilian, and paramilitary, but the Israeli numbers are rather interesting. Clearly that 6,000 cannot include military deaths, in which case we run well over that before getting to 1973, so presumably this covers civilian deaths. Assuming that this is an honest chart, we are then to presume that the appalling 75,000 figure applies to Palestinian civilians? It seems we have to presume that.

I spent a while trying to make this work. Now, admittedly, I did not use any sophisticated source material, this is all from popular sites on the Internet. However, I believe that the only way to make the numbers add up is to sit down and enter in all Palestinian loss of life in any conflict, since 1948, using both combatant and non-combatant deaths, and using the top numbers in any given conflict where it is disputed. So, for example, Black September is included in the count, and the number used must be the high one of 20,000, not the low count of 3,400.

Now, is this fair reckoning? By my estimation, there are two problems with it, one being that Israeli military deaths are being excluded, and Palestinian combatant deaths counted in, also that the Palestinian count include people killed by non-Israelis who were not acting for Israel in any way. Conceivably, those who died in Black September could be considered victims of the overall conflict, but that line of reasoning is going to get us into trouble down the road, when we start looking at that refugee claim more closely.

But by any reckoning, leaving Palestinian combatants in and Israeli combatants (and diplomatic personnel, and various others) out, which is the only way I can make sense of these numbers, is deeply dishonest, and serves an obvious agenda.

Next time: 0 Homes Destroyed? Or, "But What About Kfar Etzion?"