In a rarity, the Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler actually bothered to fact-check Joe Biden. But remarkably, this wasn't due to a major lie Biden told, but because Biden correctly cast doubt on the Palestinian death toll figures being reported by Hamas.
And in response, Kessler came out swinging in defense of the integrity of Hamas.
Last week, Biden said that he has “no confidence in the number [of casualties] that the Palestinians are using,” referring to the numbers reported by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” Biden said.
Kessler, clearly aghast for unknown reasons, described Biden’s comments as “striking.” “The State Department has regularly cited ministry statistics without caveats in its annual human rights reports,” Kessler writes. “The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which tracks deaths in the conflict, has found the ministry’s numbers to be reliable after conducting its own investigation. ‘Past experience indicated that tolls were reported with high accuracy,’ an OCHA official told [me].”
That the State Department citing Hamas statistics without caveats isn’t alarming to Kessler is itself bizarre, and the United Nations has a clear bias against Israel, passing more resolutions critical of Israel last year than all other countries combined.
Kessler then cited Gaza Health Ministry to support the statistics being put out by the Gaza Health Ministry; “Medhat Abbas, the Gaza Health Ministry’s director general, said in an interview that he was so disturbed by Biden’s comment that he ordered his staff to release a 212-page document with the name of every victim identified so far — including age, sex and identity number. The list included almost 7,000 names.”
Just two weeks ago, the Gaza Health Ministry reported that at least 500 civilians were killed when an IDF rocket struck a hospital, which the near-entirety of the mainstream media uncritically reported. It was later revealed that it was an Islamic Jihad rocket that misfired, and struck near the hospital, killing an estimated 10-50 people, or as much as 98% fewer than initially claimed.
To the surprise of only Glenn Kessler, it turns out that genocidal Jihadists aren’t the most trustworthy people out there.
Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry and The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
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