Bernie Sanders Carries Water For Hamas

In an interview with the New York Daily News, Old Yeller made this gobsmacking claim re "the number of innocent people who were killed" during the last Gaza war:

Sanders: I don’t have it in my number…but I think it’s over 10,000. My understanding is that a whole lot of apartment houses were leveled. Hospitals, I think, were bombed. So yeah, I do believe and I don’t think I’m alone in believing that Israel’s force was more indiscriminate than it should have been.

You're definitely not alone in that belief, Bernie. Most of the anti-Israel left and practically all Islamists are right there with you.

And, of course, being a lefty, you never let the facts get in the way of your "Israel-uses-disproportionate force" narrative even though, as Jonathan S. Tobin points out, it's utter, errant bollocks:

There’s a lot here to unravel, but let’s start with the level of exaggeration involved with the claim of 10,000 “innocent people killed in Gaza.” The pro-Palestinian United Nations Human Rights Council claims that 1,462 civilians out of the 2,251 people in Gaza were counted as fatalities during the 50-day war. The UNHRC is hopelessly biased against Israel and devotes more of its efforts to attacking the Jewish state than in dealing with the human rights catastrophe in Syria, where deaths can be counted in the hundreds of thousands and the refugees in the millions. But even if we took their figures to be true, Sanders is still blaming Israel for seven times more dead civilians than its worst critics. 

But the truth about civilian casualties is more complicated than that. Israel has claimed, with good reason, that at least half of those claimed as civilian deaths were, in fact, Hamas personnel. That means the number of deaths is far lower than even that 1,462 number. All unnecessary deaths in war are tragic, but what is troubling is Sanders’ willingness to accept anti-Israel propaganda at face value and to wrongly assume that Israel wasn’t doing its best with the technology it has to minimize civilian casualties. 

No army operating in the fog of war has a perfect record, and there were a few regrettable mistakes in which Israeli strikes didn’t hit the target. But had Sanders bothered to learn the truth about Gaza that most of his colleagues have assimilated, he would have known that Israel’s rules of engagements there are, if anything, more restrictive than those employed by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan...