U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power compared the raw scale of the Malaysian airliner that crashed Thursday for the Netherlands to that of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States.
The flight that crashed in Ukraine near the Russian border Thursday claimed nearly 300 passengers and crew; a large number of the passengers were Dutch.
Scale of #MH17 disaster is horrific for people of Netherlands: Number of victims relative to total population is same as 9/11 for U.S.
This was first noted by Twitter user @squarelyrooted Friday morning:
Dutch fatalities on #MH17 are at least 154, which is a larger share of their nation's population than US 9/11 fatalities were.
The website Vox then noted it as well, writing, "Many more Americans were killed in the 9/11 attacks — 2,624 in total — but because the US population is so much larger (it was roughly 285 million in 2001), the death toll represented .0009 percent of the overall population."