Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations

Friday, March 18, 2016

Four Million Muslims Killed in US-NATO Wars: Should We Call It Genocide?

Hearkening back to the Japanese interment camps of WWII, some Americans are now calling for Muslims to be placed in camps or even openly calling for genocide against the 1.6 billion practitioners of the faith.

ATTENTION EDITORS - VISUALS COVERAGE OF SCENES OF DEATH AND INJURY Afghan villagers sit near the bodies of children who they said were killed during an air strike in Kunar province April 7, 2013.REUTERS/Stringer

Image: Afghan villagers sit near the bodies of children who they said were killed during a NATO air strike in the Kunar province of Afghanistan. April 7, 2013. (Reuters)

Note: Following the recent US House of Representatives vote to declare that ISIS is committing genocide in Iraq and Syria, we bring to the attention of our readers this article originally published in August 2015.

It may never be possible to know the true death toll of the modern Western wars on the Middle East, but that figure could be 4 million or higher. Since the vast majority of those killed were of Arab descent, and mostly Muslim, when would it be fair to accuse the United States and its allies of genocide?

A March report by Physicians for Social Responsibility calculates the body count of the Iraq War at around 1.3 million, and possibly as many as 2 million. However, the numbers of those killed in Middle Eastern wars could be much higher. The actual death toll could reach as high as 4 million if one includes not just those killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the victims of the sanctions against Iraq, which left about 1.7 million more dead, half of them children, according to figures from the United Nations.

Raphael Lemkin and the definition of genocide

The term “genocide” did not exist prior to 1943, when it was coined by a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin created the word by combining the Greek root “geno,” which means people or tribe, with “-cide,” derived from the Latin word for killing.

he Nuremberg trials, in which top Nazi officials were prosecuted for crimes against humanity, began in 1945 and were based around Lemkin’s idea of genocide. By the following year, it was becoming international law, according to United to End Genocide: