Dick Gierlings

Worldtraveler | Airline pilot | jazz (alto/soprano) | ...en nieuws-gierig...

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

@ajboekestijn Dat werkt alleen als je door de genuanceerde westerse bril kijkt.

Bijzonder veel mensen kijken door een fundamenteel andere bril met een fundamenteel ander wereldbeeld.

Dat wil bij bijzonder veel mensen maar niet doordringen.

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

@speelmens Ga naar Delft, Eindhoven, Enschede. Ga studeren.
Ga onderzoek doen.
Ga bijdragen om oplossingen voor problemen te vinden.

En stop met krijsen dat een ander iets moet doen of laten, terwijl je zelf niet veel verder komt dan de eeuwige verontwaardiging.

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

@Marco24806508 @chrisklomp En “hoe mogen ze van ons…”

Vanuit de luie stoel op afstand is het zo makkelijk en risicoloos oordelen.

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

@HuubBellemakers U weet het ook niet, want treinen worden helemaal niet schoon gemaakt.

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

@maartenpodcast Iedereen met ander inzicht wordt om de haverklap ‘dom’ genoemd…?
Waarom is dat nodig…🤔?

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

Dat is de hele mop van verschil van mening.

Een andere mening dan die van jezelf heeft het bij het verkeerde eind.

Blijkbaar is het ingewikkeld om een andere mening dan die van jezelf gelijkwaardig te classificeren.

Dat als kwaadaardig classificeren vind ik een veel groter probleem dan het verschil van mening zelf.

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

@eddy_terstall

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

@mariekehoogwout @ben_derksen Vanuit de luie stoel in veilig Nederland is het makkelijk en vooral risicoloos oordelen.

Criticasters hebben het hoogste woord hoe iets niet moet, maar leveren er nooit een pragmatisch alternatief bij.

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

@monsdomus @PeterterHorst Denken dat de armen daardoor rijker worden is minstens zo sneu.

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

Nee.

Moties zijn goede bedoelingen.
Goede bedoelingen zijn geen successen.
Integendeel, de weg naar de hel is geplaveid met goede bedoelingen.

Successen zijn verkiezingsoverwinningen met aansluitend doorgevoerd beleid en wetgeving.

Vaak strandt het bij de alom aanwezige misgunfactor.

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

@hhsax @JaapStalenburg Nee hoor.
Bij slechte prestaties kun je vertrekken en bij slechte prestaties van het bedrijf ook.

Daar is bij de collectieve sector geen sprake van.
En in de ambtenarij al helemaal niet.

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

Met PRO is het onmogelijk om rijk te worden.

Als je iets over houdt door minder inkomstenbelasting, wordt dat later alsnog afgeroomd.
Dat is de grootste killer van initiatief, ondernemerschap en welvaartsgroei.

“You’d rather have the poor poorer, provided the rich were less rich”

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

@_Innocent_99 @Rob06330877 Dit is een expert.

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

Remember: genocide means a deliberate attempt to exterminate a group, simply for being members of that group. That’s what “genocide in Gaza” alleges: that Israel is unsuccessfully attempting to exterminate every last Palestinian.

Now, stand fast the fact that the only really high rate of Gazan deaths happened in the first months of the war and dropped to barely registering after the ceasefire (see graph below). One might suggest that had Israel been intent on wiping out everyone indiscriminately, they would have maintained their rate of killing.

But what about the overall population of Gaza? If Israel had wanted to wipe out every Palestinian, you’d expect that overall total to fall, right?

At some point, the word genocide has to survive contact with arithmetic. Gaza’s own records now sit in open contradiction with the claim that Israel attempted to destroy its population: approximately 121,000 live births since 7 October 2023, against a reported direct war death toll of just over 73,000.

The extermination narrative looks increasingly absurd. More babies have been born in Gaza during the war than Gazans have been recorded as killed, including both civilians and combatants.

The usual escape route is to say that genocide need not succeed. That is legally correct and intellectually evasive when deployed to make every contrary fact disappear. Genocidal intent still has to be proved, and the ICJ has held that, where it is inferred from conduct, the destruction of the group must be the only reasonable inference available.

In Croatia v Serbia, it examined whether civilians had been spared, evacuated or allowed to survive when their supposed destroyers had the opportunity to kill them. Conduct preserving members of the protected population counted against genocide.

Now apply that reasoning to Gaza.

Start with polio. In September 2024, while Israeli troops were still fighting across the Strip, Israel agreed daily, area-specific pauses so Palestinian and international medical teams could vaccinate Gaza’s children. The first round reached 559,161 children under ten, around 95 per cent of the eligible population.

Israel then agreed to do it again. The second round reached 556,774 children, with 448,425 children between two and ten also receiving vitamin A. The campaign required the delivery of 1.6 million vaccine doses, refrigerators, freezers, ice boxes and hundreds of vaccine carriers. WHO and UNICEF planned for the vaccines and cold-chain equipment to transit through Ben Gurion Airport before entering Gaza.

A third campaign followed in February 2025. It vaccinated 602,795 children under ten, reaching 102 per cent of the estimated target because medical teams found children missed during earlier rounds.

The combined figure is 1,718,730 administered polio doses. (That represents repeated protection of roughly 600,000 individual children, rather than 1.7 million different children.) Almost the entire under-10 population was reached again and again.

These vaccines were administered by Palestinian health workers, WHO, UNICEF, UNRWA and their partners. Without Israeli cooperation, the campaigns could not have happened.

UNICEF’s end-of-year report says the outbreak had been interrupted by July 2025. It also records 49,000 children under two receiving catch-up vaccinations, with coverage exceeding 80 per cent. BCG vaccinations rose from 37,471 in 2024 to 47,556 in 2025.

It was an enormous public health enterprise, run over several months, involving thousands of workers and protecting nearly every child in Gaza from paralysis.

That is the physical reality of what Israel enabled: the children it was supposedly trying to destroy were repeatedly protected against a disease that could disable or kill them.

A coherent programme of genocide cannot be inferred by treating every Israeli action that preserved Palestinian life as irrelevant.

The birth figures deepen the problem for the accusation. A reconstruction using Gaza Ministry of Health and civil registration records suggests approximately 12,000 babies were born during the final quarter of 2023, around 38,000 during 2024, 49,267 live births during 2025, and roughly 21,000 so far in 2026. The latest portion is necessarily estimated because complete July and August registrations have not yet been published.

Many babies born during the first months had been conceived before 7 October. That explanation expired nine months into the war. Tens of thousands of children were subsequently conceived and delivered while Israel supposedly pursued the biological destruction of Gaza.

Births fell below their pre-war level, hardly surprising amid displacement and combat. Miscarriages, premature births and maternal complications also rose. Nothing about those conditions was humane or desirable.

However, the comparison remains devastating. Approximately 121,000 live births against just over 73,000 reported direct war deaths leaves a difference approaching 48,000. The number killed includes combatants as well as civilians, of course.

Gaza’s overall resident population fell because the calculation includes outward migration, the missing and other demographic changes. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that around 100,000 people left Gaza during the war. A decline driven substantially by people leaving a war zone cannot simply be relabelled as physical destruction.

No Israeli advocate needs to pretend that civilian life in Gaza was tolerable. It was an urban war fought against an enemy dug into hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools and camps. Hamas designed that battlefield to make civilian deaths unavoidable and politically useful.

Israel issued evacuation warnings, created corridors and humanitarian zones, admitted food and medicine, coordinated medical evacuations, paused military operations and enabled almost 600,000 Palestinian children to receive repeated protection against polio. Around 121,000 babies were born during the war, far exceeding the reported direct death toll.

The genocide allegation survives only by declaring every piece of exculpatory evidence meaningless. Births supposedly tell us nothing. Vaccinations tell us nothing. Food deliveries tell us nothing. Humanitarian pauses tell us nothing. Failed famine predictions tell us nothing. The absence of measured famine mortality tells us nothing.

Such reasoning insulates the genocide accusation from reality. Every Palestinian death becomes proof of genocide, while every Palestinian life preserved through Israeli cooperation is dismissed as public relations.

The simpler explanation: Israel fought a devastating war against Hamas, accepting extraordinary military and political costs while repeatedly undertaking measures to preserve Palestinian civilian life. Those measures were imperfect and sometimes failed, as measures do in war.

Gaza’s own birth records, vaccination figures and famine evidence have hollowed out the allegations. A country attempting to destroy a people does not enable more than 120,000 births, facilitate 1.7 million childhood vaccine doses and support humanitarian operations feeding virtually the entire population.

That is war, with all its brutality and tragedy. It is not genocide.

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

Ik hunker naar journalisten die niet denken dat ze door God gegeven zijn en zonder kwalificaties over een ander gewoon vertellen wat er gebeurt.

Het draait namelijk niet om hen, maar om het verhaal.

Journalisten die niet al conclusies trekken vóórdat ze het onderzoek hebben gedaan en het verhaal geschreven.
Dan schrijven ze het verhaal naar de gewenste conclusie toe.

Dat is geen journalistiek.
Dat is populisme, makker!

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

@JaapStalenburg Deze expert bestrijdt hun bewijs…

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

Remember: genocide means a deliberate attempt to exterminate a group, simply for being members of that group. That’s what “genocide in Gaza” alleges: that Israel is unsuccessfully attempting to exterminate every last Palestinian.

Now, stand fast the fact that the only really high rate of Gazan deaths happened in the first months of the war and dropped to barely registering after the ceasefire (see graph below). One might suggest that had Israel been intent on wiping out everyone indiscriminately, they would have maintained their rate of killing.

But what about the overall population of Gaza? If Israel had wanted to wipe out every Palestinian, you’d expect that overall total to fall, right?

At some point, the word genocide has to survive contact with arithmetic. Gaza’s own records now sit in open contradiction with the claim that Israel attempted to destroy its population: approximately 121,000 live births since 7 October 2023, against a reported direct war death toll of just over 73,000.

The extermination narrative looks increasingly absurd. More babies have been born in Gaza during the war than Gazans have been recorded as killed, including both civilians and combatants.

The usual escape route is to say that genocide need not succeed. That is legally correct and intellectually evasive when deployed to make every contrary fact disappear. Genocidal intent still has to be proved, and the ICJ has held that, where it is inferred from conduct, the destruction of the group must be the only reasonable inference available.

In Croatia v Serbia, it examined whether civilians had been spared, evacuated or allowed to survive when their supposed destroyers had the opportunity to kill them. Conduct preserving members of the protected population counted against genocide.

Now apply that reasoning to Gaza.

Start with polio. In September 2024, while Israeli troops were still fighting across the Strip, Israel agreed daily, area-specific pauses so Palestinian and international medical teams could vaccinate Gaza’s children. The first round reached 559,161 children under ten, around 95 per cent of the eligible population.

Israel then agreed to do it again. The second round reached 556,774 children, with 448,425 children between two and ten also receiving vitamin A. The campaign required the delivery of 1.6 million vaccine doses, refrigerators, freezers, ice boxes and hundreds of vaccine carriers. WHO and UNICEF planned for the vaccines and cold-chain equipment to transit through Ben Gurion Airport before entering Gaza.

A third campaign followed in February 2025. It vaccinated 602,795 children under ten, reaching 102 per cent of the estimated target because medical teams found children missed during earlier rounds.

The combined figure is 1,718,730 administered polio doses. (That represents repeated protection of roughly 600,000 individual children, rather than 1.7 million different children.) Almost the entire under-10 population was reached again and again.

These vaccines were administered by Palestinian health workers, WHO, UNICEF, UNRWA and their partners. Without Israeli cooperation, the campaigns could not have happened.

UNICEF’s end-of-year report says the outbreak had been interrupted by July 2025. It also records 49,000 children under two receiving catch-up vaccinations, with coverage exceeding 80 per cent. BCG vaccinations rose from 37,471 in 2024 to 47,556 in 2025.

It was an enormous public health enterprise, run over several months, involving thousands of workers and protecting nearly every child in Gaza from paralysis.

That is the physical reality of what Israel enabled: the children it was supposedly trying to destroy were repeatedly protected against a disease that could disable or kill them.

A coherent programme of genocide cannot be inferred by treating every Israeli action that preserved Palestinian life as irrelevant.

The birth figures deepen the problem for the accusation. A reconstruction using Gaza Ministry of Health and civil registration records suggests approximately 12,000 babies were born during the final quarter of 2023, around 38,000 during 2024, 49,267 live births during 2025, and roughly 21,000 so far in 2026. The latest portion is necessarily estimated because complete July and August registrations have not yet been published.

Many babies born during the first months had been conceived before 7 October. That explanation expired nine months into the war. Tens of thousands of children were subsequently conceived and delivered while Israel supposedly pursued the biological destruction of Gaza.

Births fell below their pre-war level, hardly surprising amid displacement and combat. Miscarriages, premature births and maternal complications also rose. Nothing about those conditions was humane or desirable.

However, the comparison remains devastating. Approximately 121,000 live births against just over 73,000 reported direct war deaths leaves a difference approaching 48,000. The number killed includes combatants as well as civilians, of course.

Gaza’s overall resident population fell because the calculation includes outward migration, the missing and other demographic changes. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that around 100,000 people left Gaza during the war. A decline driven substantially by people leaving a war zone cannot simply be relabelled as physical destruction.

No Israeli advocate needs to pretend that civilian life in Gaza was tolerable. It was an urban war fought against an enemy dug into hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools and camps. Hamas designed that battlefield to make civilian deaths unavoidable and politically useful.

Israel issued evacuation warnings, created corridors and humanitarian zones, admitted food and medicine, coordinated medical evacuations, paused military operations and enabled almost 600,000 Palestinian children to receive repeated protection against polio. Around 121,000 babies were born during the war, far exceeding the reported direct death toll.

The genocide allegation survives only by declaring every piece of exculpatory evidence meaningless. Births supposedly tell us nothing. Vaccinations tell us nothing. Food deliveries tell us nothing. Humanitarian pauses tell us nothing. Failed famine predictions tell us nothing. The absence of measured famine mortality tells us nothing.

Such reasoning insulates the genocide accusation from reality. Every Palestinian death becomes proof of genocide, while every Palestinian life preserved through Israeli cooperation is dismissed as public relations.

The simpler explanation: Israel fought a devastating war against Hamas, accepting extraordinary military and political costs while repeatedly undertaking measures to preserve Palestinian civilian life. Those measures were imperfect and sometimes failed, as measures do in war.

Gaza’s own birth records, vaccination figures and famine evidence have hollowed out the allegations. A country attempting to destroy a people does not enable more than 120,000 births, facilitate 1.7 million childhood vaccine doses and support humanitarian operations feeding virtually the entire population.

That is war, with all its brutality and tragedy. It is not genocide.

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

@maartenpodcast Is het echt zo moeilijk om het op een hoffelijke manier oneens te zijn met iemand?

Betweterige minachting verdringt elke redelijke argumentatie en ondermijnt vooral je eigen geloofwaardigheid.

Het wordt zo langzaamaan een beetje génant.

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

@gjcats @maartenbakkerch Met deze scheldpartij weet ik zeker dat u de argumenten noch de hoffelijkheid voorhanden hebt.

Goedemiddag.

[Dick Gierlings @dickgierlings]

@gjcats @maartenbakkerch U heeft ze nog niet laten zien.