Really? The AP report titled “Israel ceases fire but troops stay in Gaza” by Amy Teibel and Ibrahim Barzak, and filed Jan 18, 2009, only contains “little” exaggeration:

JERUSALEM (AP) – Israel unilaterally ceased fire in the Gaza Strip on Sunday but kept its troops there after a 22-day war meant to halt years of rocket fire on southern Israel but whose vast scale of death and destruction provoked international outrage.

Obviously the AP reporters lack some considerable sense of proportion concerning the word “vast” and what “vast” really means.

Perhaps they should be reminded. The following is from The Free Dictionary:

vast (vst)1

adj. vast·er, vast·est

1. Very great in size, number, amount, or quantity.

2. Very great in area or extent; immense.

3. Very great in degree or intensity. See Synonyms at enormous.2

Crying out loud, Gaza itself is not, nor could it ever be described as “vast” in any sense of the term. Let’s see, it’s a whole 139 sq. miles in area.3

Hmmmmm. . . The county I live in, one of the 100 counties in Arkansas (a relatively small state) is 956 sq. miles in area.4

What about population? Well Gaza has about 1.5 million people,5 of which, about 1100-1200 died during Operation Cast Lead, which is about .08% of the population. Crying out loud, America lost about 1465 soldiers on D-Day6 alone.

I think the reporting by the AP is “disproportionate.”

Vast? Vast? Let’s go shovel this out of the barnyard.

  1. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/vast [↩]
  2. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. [↩]
  3. Gaza Strip – Wikipedia [↩]
  4. Washington County, Arkansas – Wikipedia [↩]
  5. Gaza Strip – Wikipedia [↩]
  6. Normandy Landings – Wikipedia [↩]
Share