In his recent piece for The Free Press, Michael Ames accuses others—journalists, NGOs, international aid agencies—of engaging in rhetorical manipulation. Yet the irony is almost unbearable: his own article is a masterclass in precisely that. Ames purports to clarify, to cut through the noise and deliver a sobering verdict on what he calls “The Gaza Famine Myth.” But what he’s really doing is laundering moral cowardice through the language of skepticism.
Let’s be extremely clear here. This is not an honest effort to parse facts. It is a carefully calculated attempt to recast a humanitarian catastrophe as a narrative inconvenience. Ames’s central trick is both obvious and deeply dangerous: he swaps moral clarity for semantic wrangling, treating the absence of an official “famine” designation as evidence that there is no famine at all.
This is the bureaucratic version of “Who are you going to believe—me, or your lying eyes?”
Famine declarations are not handed out like parking tickets. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) requires the confluence of three rather horrifying metrics: at least 20% of the population facing extreme food shortages, 30% of children suffering acute malnutrition, and a death rate of two per 10,000 per day. These thresholds are conservative by design, and catastrophically hard to confirm in active war zones. Especially when the occupying force restricts access, bombs convoys, and refuses to allow independent verification on the ground.
Ames doesn’t mention this. Instead, he presents the absence of certification as proof of absence. It’s a sleight of hand—legalistic, bloodless, and intellectually dishonest.
What is happening in Gaza right now is not ambiguous. It is not speculative. The United Nations has warned repeatedly of impending famine. UNICEF has documented the collapse of clean water and sanitation. USAID’s own chief, Samantha Power—no stranger to statecraft or calculated language—acknowledged that Gaza was “credibly” in famine. And that was over a year ago. But rather than confront reality, Ames performs semantic gymnastics, accusing others of exaggeration while cherry-picking anecdotes to build his case.
The most egregious example is his invocation of Gaza-based Instagram chefs and car dealerships. As if the presence of a single social media account or a functioning auto lot somehow cancels out the images of skeletal toddlers and mothers boiling weeds for food. This is not journalism. It’s closer to comedy, but who, I ask, is laughing?
It’s worth pausing here to consider the mindset required to frame this as a debate about perception rather than survival. The mass starvation of children is not a matter of optics. It is a matter of record. According to credible reports, even published by Israeli media, 100% of Gaza’s population is facing crisis-level hunger. That number should chill anyone with a functioning conscience.
Ames, however, seems unfazed. He devotes more energy to parsing missing calorie estimates than to interrogating why aid trucks are sitting idle at border crossings while people die. His fixation on methodological imperfections conveniently omits the broader reality: food is scarce, distribution has collapsed, and international humanitarian law is being shredded in real time.
Perhaps most cynically, Ames attempts to discredit Gaza’s death tolls by highlighting Hamas’s role in reporting them. That’s fair, up to a point. But his implication is that, because one party’s data may be compromised, no data can be trusted. This is absurd. It’s also revealing. Israel, after seven months of relentless bombardment, has still refused to offer its own civilian casualty figures. That silence doesn’t absolve Hamas of its crimes. But it does obliterate Ames’s pretense of balance.
This isn’t journalism. Not good journalism, anyway. This is narrative policing. It’s an effort to protect a particular worldview from the contamination of truth.
And that worldview is collapsing under the weight of bodies.
To write off mass starvation on a technicality is not merely callous. It is a dereliction of moral duty. Whether the IPC has signed off or not, when children die of dehydration and mothers bury their babies in makeshift graves, we are not in the realm of theory – we are in the realm of atrocity.
There’s a reason the UN’s special rapporteurs have called this situation unprecedented. There’s a reason aid groups are using the word “genocide” with growing urgency. And there’s a reason even American officials, hardly known for hyperbole, are sounding the alarm.
Ames would prefer we wait—for more data, tighter definitions, and the kind of proof that cannot be obtained under siege. He would like us to believe that the real crisis is not starvation but reporting on starvation, that the NGOs are the threat, not the missiles, and that the story is being distorted—not the bodies.
It’s a grotesque inversion of reality.
What’s most alarming, though, is how familiar this tactic has become. In today’s information ecosystem, it is no longer enough to manufacture doubt. One must now market that doubt as intellectual virtue. Ames doesn’t say there’s no famine. He just suggests that we can’t be sure. He doesn’t deny the images; he just tells you that they’re misleading. He doesn’t argue in bad faith—he just redefines what faith even means.
But people are starving. Aid is being withheld. Convoys are being bombed. Children are dying with sunken eyes and bloated bellies while men like Michael Ames write think pieces about whether those deaths “count.”
This is how atrocities are normalized. Not through lies, but through carefully curated skepticism.
There is no safety in neutrality. Not here. Not now. To write an article like Ames’ is to participate in a campaign of distraction. To grant cover to policies that dehumanize and destroy. To pretend, in the face of overwhelming suffering, that the real danger is saying the wrong word.
Gaza doesn’t need your semantics. It needs food. It needs water. It needs mercy.
Call it what you want.
But do not pretend this suffering isn’t real.
This article was originally featured at Antiwar.com and is republished with permission.
