War Reporter Arwa Damon Rips Scott Galloway Over ‘Horrid’ Gaza Remarks on MSNBC

Veteran foreign correspondent Arwa Damon told Mediaite that NYU Professor Scott Galloway was wrong to use a “horrid” calculus to defend the level of civilian death in Gaza relative to other conflicts.

Damon was a guest on this week’s edition of Mediaite’s new Press Club podcast, hosted by Aidan McLaughlin.

In their wide-ranging interview, Damon shared her insights on life in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war after a recent visit, as well as her years of experience as a war correspondent.

McLaughlin also asked about Galloway’s claim, made on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, that Israel is subject to a “double standard” when it comes to war and civilian casualties:

Speaking of those killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Galloway said, “We weren’t accused of genocide… but Jews are not allowed and Israel is not allowed to prosecute a war. And they are prosecuting a war more humanely than we have done.”

“The ratio of combatants to civilians is lower than it was in Mosul, lower than it was in Japan, lower than it was in Germany,” he argued. “There’s just a different standard for Jews in Israel.”

Damon, who reported on the ground from the Battle of Mosul, rejected that comparison:

ARWA DAMON: I think that’s a bit ridiculous. Look, just dial it back for a second, we the press should have put more scrutiny on the US for some of the strikes it carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact that it wasn’t is not because there’s a double standard being applied to Israel, it’s because the media didn’t necessarily do its job. There historically has been this culture of — we let people in power get away, quite literally, with murder.

But to go back to the whole civilian to combatant ratio, I mean, that’s just a horrid way to do a calculus. And I do not think it’s correct. If we want to look at comparisons of Gaza and Mosul, for example — and I’m not a marketing professor, I was actually a journalist who was on the ground in Mosul — Israel has killed three times as many civilians over the course of seven months [in Gaza] than the Mosul offensive did over the course of 18 months. Both of these wars were taking place in highly, densely populated urban areas.

The other key difference also in the way that Israel is carrying out its bombing campaign versus, say, the United States, for example, is this idea of: When do you carry out a strike on a target that you’ve been tracking? We know that Israel tracks its targets, as does the US. The US, generally speaking — of course this doesn’t happen all the time — but the US will generally speaking wait for a target to be in a less densely populated area before carrying out the strike, and/or it will use a missile if it is in a very highly populated urban area, that will only bring down the building that the targeted individual is in. The Israelis do the exact opposite of that. They track these targets until they get into their homes, and then they use 1,000 to 2,000 pound bombs. And I think that’s a big difference here that a lot of people aren’t necessarily aware of or taking into consideration.

Watch above via Mediaite’s new Press Club podcast. Watch the full episode here.

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