PJ Media

Again I say this study is completely bogus. There is no way anything approaching 500 “excess deaths” a day would escape the lamestream media’s notice for three years, and certainly not Al Jazeera’s notice.

I will continue to contend that the vast majority of these deaths are male, and they are males of fighting age. Is this why the John Hopkin’s/Lancet study didn’t establish proper demographic information, so we couldn’t draw these conclusions given the lack of demography?

If there were random acts of violence, even in a male-dominate society like Iraq, you would expect to see roughly equal numbers of men, women and a lot of children (they have big families over there) being killed with maybe a bias toward males since they are out in public more. Little doubt most of these deaths are the result of Shia and Sunni clashes – Muslims killing Muslims in sectarian violence on the streets in direct contradiction to their Koran (I’ve read it).

One poster brought up Fallujah to make another valid point, but I want to use the Fallujah example to establish another valid observation. Having visited many of the Iraqi blogs, which can be accessed from American sites like the MudvilleGazette.com, the point was being made throughout the U.S. Marine effort to rid the city of Islamofascist riff-raff that when Muslim “insurgents” were wounded on the battlefield they were taken to the local hospitals and tagged as a “civilian casualty” – after all, they were wearing civilian clothes, right? One Marine unit involved in clearing action near one of those hospitals noticed that the vast majority of those being brought in were Muslim males of fighting age suffering from battlefield-type wounds. Now it was my understanding virtually all the civilian population within Fallujah had been previously evacuated so there was no way that these Muslim males were simply civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time. It would be interesting to do a narrow survey during the time period of the American offensive in Fallujah using the same methodology that Prof. Burhama thinks is legitimate and then see what kind of “excess death” numbers his team comes up with even though we know most all of the civilian populace had been evacuated from that region during that time.

The Israelis noticed the same pattern when they went into Lebanon to clear out Hezbollah. Hezbollah fighers were usually in civilian clothes (some were even dressed in female clothing!) and whenever any Muslim male was brought into the local hospital he was invariably tagged by stringers and western media as a civilian.

I don’t know why westerners insist on their insular ignorance with respect to the tactics used by Muslim radicals in trying to influence western media. North Vietnamese General Giap credited the American media and American anti-war movement (calling them his “anti-war friends” in his self-congratulatory memoir How We Won The War) for demoralizing the American people and revitalizing the NVA and Viet Cong after the communists’ disasterous Tet military defeat in 1968. Of course Cronkite and the rest of the media saw it as a huge defeat for America and that’s how its been taught by left-wing and not so left-wing profs to this day. A pack of lies, just like the screed the Nazis were “right-wing” when in fact they were anti-capitalist, national socialists who practiced collectivist government control over privately owned businesses and industry.