Wednesday, May 29, 2024

Accounting (of the dead)

 

The Rafa missile landing on the tent camps, described later by the Israeli PM as a tragic mistake, caused mid-30 deaths, two hundred and forty injured, in early reports. (Unknown whether the missile was the one the former Republican candidate Nikki Haley had scrawled with the message, FINISH THEM.) In the PNG landslide the numbers slid upward from low hundreds to multiple thousands, before a later report suggested the figure might have been greatly over-estimated.  A Melbourne Jewish singer in a news report in the morning’s paper contested the term “children” in counting of the dead in Gaza. If early & mid-teens were given guns by their elders—reprehensible parenting implied—could such be classified as children? 

Another report reminded of the comment from an award-winning NYT journalist from the period of the Iraq invasion. Rousing the troops to the mission, the advice to the American soldiers entering Iraqi houses with guns drawn was to tell the inhabitants, Suck on this. (Estimates of two hundred thousand Iraqi casualties had been suggested in some reports of the time.)





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