A new Gaza crisis: is Gaza drowning in aid?
Is too much aid ever a problem? According to Martin Kramer’s Sandbox, if a report in the Boston Globe is accurate Gaza may soon be “buried in flour”.
The Globe’s report is written by Eyad al-Sarraj, founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, and Sara Roy, a political economist and researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.
As documented by NGO Monitor, Gaza Community Mental Health Program has in the past promoted the idea of boycotts. They signed petitions for both an economic and an academic boycott of Israel. I guess it depends on who you are boycotting and why. The sanctions placed on Gaza (not including free-flowing humanitarian aid) is a response to the barrage of missiles fired by Hamas and others at Israel, in accordance with their belief in Israel’s complete destruction (a campaign Hamas refuses to renounce). But back to the crisis in Gaza…
According to Eyad al-Sarraj and Sara Roy, “Although Gaza daily requires 680,000 tons of flour to feed its population, Israel had cut this to 90 tons per day by November 2007, a reduction of 99 percent.” As they place the population of Gaza at 1.5 million, this would mean there is half a ton of flour per Gazan, per day. That is quite a bit of flour… and that is after this so called 99% reduction.
With a mistake of this magnitude one would suspect that there may be a typo in the article. On his blog, Kramer shows that the authors have used this statistic before, and traces it back to an article in the Ahram Weekly last November. Our last post discussed the need for accuracy in NGO reporting. Basic sanity checking of claims is not too much to ask. Solomonia notes that the Globe article is “full of tendentious claims” and this is just one of them. In an item of satire CAMERA’s Snapshots speculates about the possible uses of so much flour.
When NGO’s claims (made it seems for political purposes) are not just wrong, but clearly absurd, they turn the important work of human rights into a farce. Other hard working human rights activists may not take this so kindly.
