House of Representatives Votes 269-144 to Ban State Department from Citing Gaza Death Toll
House of Representatives Votes 269-144 to Ban State Department from Citing Gaza Death Toll
In more news from Capitol Hill, lawmakers have barred the U.S. State Department from citing death toll figures provided by the Gaza Ministry of Health. Ahead of Thursday’s vote, Congress’s lone Palestinian American lawmaker, Democrat Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, read into the Congressional Record the ...
Rep. Rashida Tlaib: “But Palestinians are not just numbers. Behind these numbers are real people — mothers, fathers, sons, daughters — who have had their lives stolen from them and their families torn apart. And we should not be trying to hide it. These are innocent children and babies who have been bombed in their tents, burned alive, dismembered and deliberately starved to death. Where is our shared humanity in this chamber? There is so much anti-Palestinian racism in this chamber that my colleagues don’t even want to acknowledge that Palestinians exist at all, not when they’re alive and now not even when they’re dead. It’s absolutely disgusting. This is genocide denial.”
I Wouldn't expect any less from this gold plated cesspool founded on genocide, slavery, and exploitation.
"herp derp but we saved the world and beat the Nazis!" Yeah, we fought and defeated the Axis... after they decimated our pacific fleet and brought the war to us. Prior to that, eugenics were popular here, and practiced. Hell, some of our most infamous capitalists supplied and financed both sides of that war, after all, private profit is what America is all about.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers-willing-business-partners/303146/
We're dogshit, all the way back to the zealots fleeing Europe to be bigger religious prudes and nutters. The only amazing thing about our country is its ridiculously massive, undeserved ego.
Not to mention that they didn't join the war until the Russians and Germans had bled themselves dry on the eastern front and the soviets were well on their way to Berlin.
If you wanted to debate who won the war based on how many of their men, women, military and civilian sacrificed themselves willingly and unwillingly, the Russians were far and away the obvious victors.
20 million compared to America's half million during the war.
The Russians died and killed more Germans than the Americans.
The absolute scale of the Eastern Front compared to the Western Front is mind-boggling, and American media and education downplays the tremendous sacrifices made by the Red Army and how much they accomplished.
During the war, the Western Allies were more than happy to have Nazi Germany and the USSR bleed each other out as much as possible, and then pretend they were team members on equal footing.
they didn’t join the war until the Russians and Germans had bled themselves dry on the eastern front and the soviets were well on their way to Berlin.
Your timeline is way off here. The US joined the war against Germany on Dec. 11th 1941, less than six months after Germany's invasion of the USSR which had not yet even stalled out in front of Moscow. The Soviets weren't "well on their way to Berlin" until late 1944, nearly three years later. Your other points are valid enough that you don't need to utterly mangle your first one.
So, what I’m hearing is we have lots of room to do better. 😃
…our most infamous capitalists supplied and financed both sides…
Not the least of whom happened to be Fred Trump, the former president’s father. Unfortunately there is a large gap in his FBI file before and after the war, where we would expect to find documented proof of these activities. Still, it seems pretty clear what happened, and he certainly didn’t hide his racism publicly.
Good to know our government can still get shit done when it's something fucking stupid.
I almost typed "I don't know why we invest in ignorance," but I do. Goddamn dude
Yes. It's the facts that are misleading, not us. The ole "you can't handle the truth."
I dug up the roll call for this vote, if anyone wants to look up how their representative voted.
Let me guess where most of the yay votes came from...
Edit: checked and surprise! Most Aaye votes are Republican. Only actual surprise is that there are 62 Democrats in there who should spend a week in Gaza to understand what they really really votes for.
How did so many vote yes for this? Mine didn't, but that's kind of a no brainer given their constituency.
The American Empire requires a foothold in the Middle East, simple as that, really.
i'm somewhat happy that mine didn't either
Shame to see Colin Allred voted yea. He’s the only hope we have to unseat Ted Cruz this year.
The parallels between Ukraine and Gaza has made it clear that if you want public outrage those babies better be white or else they will be reported as collateral damage instead of genocide.
The only lesson learned from the COVID years: if you stop reporting the numbers, the numbers stop going up.
#MissionComplete
it always irks me when someone says that biden handled covid when he simply had the numbers hidden from the public like a few state governors and trump tried to do, but got a lot of blowback for it.
CDC Covid data, as of June 29, 2024.
"...with a death total so high that we have been banned from telling you the number..."
Man what the fuck. What is their justification for this.
that anything coming from a gazan mouth must be propaganda; but they're the only ones on the ground counting their numbers are smaller than others' estimates
Should be mentioned that the Israeli gov kicked out all the other human rights orgs
The American Empire requires Israel as an Imperialist foothold in the Middle East. They will protect Israel and manufacture consent as much as they can to prevent public backlash.
They actually don't even need Israel, Turkey is our NATO ally already and has the same access to the sea. Obviously Erdogan is a authoritarian dickshit, but at least they're not actively committing a genocide.
Israel has no dramatic geopolitical value to the US at this point, they're basically just a client. Though you wouldn't think it by the way Netanyahu yanks Biden around by his testicles. The unquestioning support for Israel is ideological for people like Biden, and for others it's all the money from AIPAC and JStreet
wtf
Bought, cheaply, and paid for by AIPAC. Until this war I had no idea how politically deep they are.
Let’s not forget CUFI’s part.
Bad Christians
That's because it's a severe undercount, right?
...
Right?
Don't need to talk in memes there brother.
House of Representatives Votes 269-144 to Ban State Department
from Citing Gaza Death Toll
This is insane.
This is conservatives.
This is the bipartisan rules-based international order. There are 220 republicans and 213 Democrats in the House, and the vote was 269-144.
but some people will say both sides are the same
I want names. I've got some angry letters to write.
Government banning speech, I understand it's what the government says, but I feel someone is going to test the limit on this, and the first amendment is going to suffer for it.
This has nothing to do with the first amendment. It's fucking bullshit, yeah, but not 1a related.
This is about parliamentary procedure, they can (and do, and always have) make whatever rules of decorum that they want.
LADY, WE DONT TALK ABOUT THE GENOCIDES THAT WE COMMMIT
That's cuz it'SS SSettler SSolidarity in action between Amerikkka and ISSrael...
I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed
What the fuck.
United States of Israel.
Someone should send them all copies of “The Monster at the end of the book”
This is why we don’t like censorship culture.
Everyone who summons a demon to help their cause thinks they can put a leash on the demon and keep it in its lane.
lawmakers have barred the U.S. State Department from citing death toll figures provided by the Gaza Ministry of Health
I wonder if the issue is the source? I don't know anything about the Gaza Ministry of Health to know how accurate their reporting might be.
yes, it's the source; but not in the way you might be thinking.
the assumption is that anything out of a gazan mouth must be propaganda, but they're the only ones on the ground counting and their numbers are in line with estimates from other groups and lower than some of them.
The Gaza Ministry of Health has been recognized as a believable source (under the circumstances of being in a state of war since 2007) by the US government for years. This is a purely political move.
Lol, I don't think that's it.
On 10 November 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US intelligence community has growing confidence that death toll reports from the Gaza Health Ministry are roughly accurate. The article also reported that despite US officials had growing confidence, they did not have enough information to confirm for sure.
In January 2024, Israeli news magazine Mekomit reported that Israeli intelligence officials had concluded that Health Ministry casualty reports are generally reliable and are used in briefings to senior officials.
So yeah, that's probably not it. I just instinctively distrust orgs that have a clear motive to misreport figures (i.e. inflating numbers could get other countries to intervene on Gaza's behalf).
The provision specifically states that funding will not be “made available” for the State Department “to cite statistics obtained from the Gaza Health Ministry.”
This seems like rhetoric without any actual substance or consequences
The Gaza health ministry are the only ones that have real numbers. And they're probably barely counting now because all the hospitals have been bombed. Everyone else only has estimates.
Not that it matters but what they actually voted on was using the numbers provided by the Gaza ministry of health as they claim those numbers are propaganda and not based in fact.
Still shitty but not "you aren't allowed to count the dead" shitty
Is anyone else on the ground in Gaza counting the dead? The health ministry is the only source, so functionally that's what this law does. And if you compare the health ministry numbers to the recent estimate by the Lancet (~180000), the health ministry is under counting, because they only know of the people that have been brought into hospitals, not the ones still under rubble or executed and left to rot/buried in mass graves by the IDF.
Totally agree. Not sure why I'm being downvoted to oblivion for providing objectively factual statements about the content of the vote.
You're right. It's fucked. I'm just trying to provide clarity to an ambiguous post title
The Lancet "study" was not peer-reviewed paper, but just a letter-to-the-editor.