Sara Roy: Harvard "Expert" Can't Do the Math

A Saturday op-ed in the Boston Globe co-authored by Harvard Middle East studies scholar Sara Roy charges Israel with purposefully starving the population of Gaza. But in "Ending the Stranglehold on Gaza," Roy demonstrates her own stranglehold on truth.

Middle East studies scholar Martin Kramer takes apart Roy's claim that "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. Not surprisingly, there has been a sharp increase in the prices of foodstuffs."

As Kramer shows in "Gaza Buried in Flour," that means that "if Gaza has a population of 1.5 million, as the authors also note, then 680,000 tons of flour a day come out to almost half a ton of flour per Gazan, per day [emphasis original]."

Kramer traces the geneology of the error from its origins in an Egyptian newspaper to the Globe via this Harvard scholar, and notes that Roy herself claimed that Gaza needed 275 tons a day a decade ago.

Read the rest--it'll be the funniest thing you read all day.