I missed this a few days ago but Greg Hengler didn’t. By “a hundred 9/11s,” she doesn’t mean to say that 300,000 Palestinians have been killed; she’s making a comparison based on the size of each country’s population. If one attack kills 10 people from a village with a population of 100 and another attack kills 100 people from a city with a population of 10,000, supposedly the first attack is equivalent to the second attack ten times over despite having one-tenth the death toll. I’ve heard supporters of Israel make this argument too, emphasizing how small the country is to try to drive home to outsiders how much greater the magnitude of even a smaller-scale terror attack feels. I’ve never understood it, as it inevitably implies that people from smaller populations do or should value the lives of their neighbors more than people from larger populations do or should. That may be defensible in the case of a very small population, where all the members know each other and feel the loss intimately, but as we start talking about groups in the hundreds of thousands or millions, the logic evaporates. And you know, as a New Yorker born and bred, I’ve gotta say: I felt the loss on 9/11 pretty sharply, notwithstanding the fact that 3,000 people are a tiny fraction of the city’s population, let alone the country’s. I bet I felt it more sharply than the Palestinians who were dancing in the streets on 9/11 when the towers came down. And I know I felt it more sharply than the degenerates in Hamas, who thrill to the sight of dead Palestinian kids knowing that western media like MSNBC will use it to paint Hamas itself as a victim rather than an aggressor.

And that’s really the point of this “How many World Trade Center jumpers are equivalent to one dead Palestinian?” math problem. The numbers in the 9/11 analogy aren’t important; what’s important, as Hengler says, is equating Israel with Al Qaeda and Hamas with Manhattan office workers, an Orwellian inversion of the ideological alliances here. The supreme media distortion in covering this conflict, as S.E. Cupp says, is how the press often ignores Hamas’s openly genocidal ambitions. Al Qaeda deliberately targeted civilians on 9/11 and Hamas, quite candidly, deliberately targets every Jew in Israel, and yet on MSNBC somehow Gaza is the victim of a hundred 9/11s. Unbelievable.