Uncle Watch I
Uncle’s most recent rant complains about Linda Mottram’s maths. She said that “500 Palestinian children have been killed”, but Uncle disagrees. And so he might — as he points out, there is some disagreement about how old you can be while remaining a child:
[T]he Palestinian human rights monitors, … treat as children anyone below the age of 18, combatants included… Even so, the Palestians’ total of ‘children’ killed is 148.
How very wrong he is. After an extensive discussion of the relevant law, the PHRM took precisely the opposite view to that ascribed to them by Uncle:
[B]ecause international law does distinguish between children below 15 and children aged 15 to 18, we have decided to include the latter in a separate category.
So 148 is their figure for children under the age of fifteen, not under the age of 18 as Uncle claims. Wnat’s more, there is no indication of how recent their figure is, which means it is totally useless for the purposes of Uncle’s argument.
So where does the figure of five hundred come from? I don’t know. One of the biggest problems is the lack of accurate statistics. Different groups come up with different figures. For example, an Israeli anti-terrorist think tank (to which Uncle is endeared) puts the number of Palestinian “Non-combatants below age 12″ killed at 69. I can’t find any other source that puts the figure that low. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society says that 110 children below the age of 12 were killed. Does this mean that 41 of dead Palestinian children below the age of 12 were combatants? I doubt it.
The Red Crescent reckons 434 Palestinians under the age of 18 have been killed, which is pretty close to the ABC’s figure. The Palestinian Human Rights Centre makes it 433. The Arab Human Development Report, which is hardly favourable to Arab regimes, claims that “From September, 2000, to April, 2003, Israeli occupation forces killed 2,405 Palestinians… A large proportion (20 per cent) were children.” The report is quoted here, or download the full document, which claims there were 451 child deaths (p42). Defence for Children International concurs, putting the figure (up to the beginning of September 2003) at 470 Palestinian children dead. So perhaps 500 is stretching things slightly, but Mottram appears to be pretty close to the mark.
More here…
