Still More Logical Fallacies of the Anti-Israel Brigades

Elder of Ziyon several weeks ago compiled a list of the various logical fallacies the anti-Israel haters exhibit; find it here. I discussed the first seven here, and four more here. Here are still more:

12. Argument from Motives (reverse) fallacy: “Too many Palestinian men beat their wives and children, but it is understandable because they live under occupation.”

Muslim Arab men, not just the Palestinians, treat their wives as chattel. After all, in Islam a man may beat his wife if he even suspects her of being disobedient. A woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man. A daughter inherits half that of a son. A husband can take up to four wives; his wife can have only one husband. A Muslim husband can divorce his wife merely by uttering the triple-talaq. A wife wanting to divorce her husband faces a lengthy legal procedure. All of these facts reinforce the idea of male superiority; the man is master of his family, and can punish his wives and children at will. Muslims commit 91% of the “honor killings” in the world. When a female member of the family is killed by her father or brothers or uncles for having sullied by her conduct the family’s honor, in Muslim lands these “honor killings” are seldom punished. Don’t blame Israel for the mistreatment of women and children by Muslim men that is as old as Islam itself.

13. Argumentum ad Baculum: “We can silence Zionist voices by bullying them and anyone who wants to listen to them.”

So the Arab enemies of Israel believe that they can make “Zionists” — through force or the threat of force (“Baculum” means “stick”) — to simply shut up. But this doesn’t seem to be working. Articulate defenders of Israel are everywhere, uncowed by being greatly outnumbered. Even at the UN the Israeli ambassador replies devastatingly to the anti-Israel cabal at work in the General Assembly and at the Security Council, where a kangaroo court, in continuous session, keeps the Jewish state perennially in the dock.

14. Hyperbole Bias: “Israel has wreaked more destruction on Gaza than any war in history.” “Israelis are worse than Nazis.”

Not true. Think only of the USAF and RAF carpet bombings of Dresden, the Luftwaffe bombing of Coventry, the USAF firebombing of Tokyo, which killed 100,000 and left one million homeless, the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which leveled the centers of both cities and killed 226,000 Japanese. Each of these attacks destroyed far more infrastructure, and killed many more people, than the IDF attacks in Gaza.

As for the nauseating claim that “Israelis are worse than Nazis,” where to begin? How about with the fact that in Gaza, of the 39,000 that Hamas has reported killed — a figure we have no way of verifying, and the terror group has a history of exaggerating the numbers killed by the IDF — about 20,000 were civilians (the other 19,000 were Hamas and PIJ operatives), while the Nazis killed not just six million Jews, but were responsible for many millions of other deaths in Europe, including 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 1.8 million Poles, several hundred thousand Gypsies, 600,000 Serbs, tens of thousands of disabled people, political dissidents, and many others. That total likely comes close to the six million deaths of Jews who were murdered.

How does the figure of 12 million people murdered by the Nazis compare to Israel, that in seven months of war has (according t0 Hamas) killed 39,000 people? There is no comparison. Only a deep-dyed antisemite could claim that “Israel is worse than the Nazis.”

15. Bandwagon Fallacy: “We are on the right side of history!” “Most young people now support Palestinians.”

Only Marxist determinists believe “we are on the right side of history.” There is still free will, there is still room to fashion our own destinies, without throwing our hands up in despair or, as the callow nitwits protesting on our campuses today do, in triumph. What about the notion that“most young people now support Palestinians”? Is this true? There are 6,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. Students have so far taken part in pro-Hamas protesters in fewer than 100 of them. And in many cases, the “protests” consisted of fewer than a hundred students. But the breathless coverage by the news media has made it seem that all over America campuses were being roiled, and that many thousands of students at each campus were participating. That isn’t true. At Columbia slightly more than 1,000 people (less than half were students) took part; hundreds were arrested. At Harvard, the protesters were about the same number; at UCLA there were close to 2,000 people who took part in the protest on that campus. And these were the three campuses with the largest protests. We conclude that in all about 15,000-20,000 students took place in the protests on the affected campuses. But compare that to the figure of 19 million students, undergraduate and graduate, in American colleges and universities, and you see how false is the claim that “most young people now support the Palestinians.” In fact, in the latest Harvard/Harris Poll, a clear majority of people between the ages of 18 and 24 — 57% —now say they support Israel more than Hamas. In a previous poll in January , only 37% of those polled said that they supported Israel more than Hamas. Israel’s support is going steadily up, even among the youngest cohort.

The more these logical fallacies are named and their users shamed, the better.