Number Of Protesters At Tel Aviv Rally May Have Been Exaggerated--By 300%

Did you see the most recent Latma?

Remember after the opening 'joke' when (at 35 seconds) Ronit kept showing the clip of the Tel Aviv protests over and over--each time increasing the number of protesters from 150,000 to 300,000 and 500,000?



Apparently, that's what the Israeli media has been doing--exaggerating the numbers of the Tel Aviv protesters:

Leading television and Internet news outlets proclaimed that there were close to 300,000 people there. 

Ma'ariv's Uri Radler calls this claim "physically impossible." The length of Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv, where the protest took place, is 564 meters, he explains, and its average width is 30 meters, sidewalks included. The total area of the central protest was close to 17 dunams (over four acres and close to 17,000 square meters).

Crowd density was low – especially at the sides of the road. Therefore the reasonable estimate of the number of protesters in Kaplan Street is about 50,000. Several thousand people stood in adjoining streets, and others came and went. All in all, he says, there were 62 to 65 thousand people in Tel Aviv's protest.

That was the Tel Aviv protest--but according to Radler, that is not the only protest where the numbers have been inflated. For instance, there is the protest in Jerusalem:

In Jerusalem, Ynet reported 30,000 protesters in Paris Square. Radler says he took a Flash 90 photograph of the crowd and counted the people, one by one. He reached 2,457. Even taking into account that some protesters are outside the frame, and others came and went – the total number cannot reasonably be estimated at more than 5,000.

The article closes with Radler's question: When will we reach the point at which 100 million Israelis take to the street?"

Based on the Latma sketch, I'd say next week.

This of course is the opposite of what the liberal media likes to do in the US, where it will take the turnout for a rally organized by someone like Glenn Beck

and try to make it seem as small as possible.

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