Whose genocide will it be?

By John R. Thomson
Monday, August 27, 2007

Throughout most of the Muslim world, in virtually all media and with hardly a whimper of demurral, the charge is leveled and endlessly reiterated: the United States, frequently with its hated accomplice Israel, is labeled the world's modern leader in genocide. Led by George Bush, supported by his Zionist accomplices, it is charged the genocide is aimed at one segment of society: Muslims.

In madrassas and mosques, in the press and on television, with hardly an American much less Muslim voice raised to counter the calumnies, we, who consider ourselves the defenders of life and liberty, are charged, tried and convicted as the perpetrators of massive Muslim massacres from Detroit's Arab community to Darfur and to all points east.

Imams in their Friday sermons, commentators on television and demonstrators' placards in Birmingham, Damascus, Islamabad and London berate our country for supposedly heinous crimes which make minimal whatever may have been done by the regimes of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and currently, Sudanese President and Field Marshal Omar al-Bashir.

The objectives of this unprecedented and thoroughly mendacious propaganda are clear. First, the campaign seeks to distract as much of the world's attention as possible from the real murderers, the true ethnic and religious cleansers. For the truth is, the perpetrators to an overwhelming degree are the Muslims themselves.

Simultaneously, the accusations are calculated to inflame the credulous Arab/Muslim street, in order to

• justify murderous Muslim terrorism,
• recruit gullible suicide bombers and
• attract covert support from Saudi Arabia, once a stalwart U.S. ally.

Well-researched and extremely revealing statistics, gleaned from publicly available sources, decimate what fanatical Islamists are telling the world about the two terrible, sadistic "Satans". Muslims have slaughtered millions of their fellow Muslims, for political, religious or ethnic reasons. Not incidentally, this frightening phenomenon is a principal danger in premature U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

From the end of the 19th century, when the first Zionists settled in Palestine, the Arab-Israeli conflict has produced some 60 thousand Arab fatalities. An estimated 6,000 were Palestinians, the majority soldiers, as in the Six Day war in 1967, and the Yom Kippur war in 1973 [in fact, most battle casualties were Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian and Turk combatants fighting in the many wars commencing in 1948].

In the 1954-62 Algerian war of independence from France, estimates range from 600 thousand to Algerian claims of more than a million Muslim deaths.

In Indonesia, with the world's largest Muslim population, 400 thousand were murdered in 1965-66. Adding East Timor, between 1975 and 1999 another 100-200 thousand Muslims and Christians were killed by the Indonesian army.

In largely Muslim Chechnya, during the period 1994-1996 Russian military murdered as many as 200 thousand; while in Kosovo in 1998-2000, the Serbs assassinated some 10 thousand Muslims.

The Bangladeshi fight for independence from Pakistan in 1971 led to between 1.4 and 2 million Muslims deaths.

In Somalia's, long running civil war, at least 550 thousand Muslims have perished. A 1988 aerial bombardment ordered by dictator Siad Barre flattened Somaliland's regional capital, Hargeisa, and slaughtered 50 thousand, in one horrific week.

Sudanese Muslim regimes have conducted 50 years of genocide in the south, of blacks, Nubians and other Muslims, resulting in between 2.6 and 3 million fatalities, including 2.4 million civilian deaths.

In Afghanistan, the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion and subsequent occupation produced between one and 1.5 million civilian Muslim murders over 10 years, plus another 90 thousand Mujahideen and Taliban fighters, equally split between Soviet and warring Muslim factions. The American invasion in 2001 created perhaps 10 thousand fatalities, interrupting the estimated 1.2 million additional deaths generated by Muslim militias' protracted civil war following Soviet withdrawal. The Taliban's current one-by-one assassinations of two dozen Korean Christian aid workers are a ghastly exception from routine murders of fellow Afghan Muslims.

In fact, the worst slaughters of Muslims have been committed by other Muslims, for political, religious or ethnic reasons. In Afghanistan, the Mujahideen and Taliban have been responsible for more than a million murders.

In Iraq, the 1980-88 war with Iran produced more than 1.5 million Muslim deaths. Saddam’s endless domestic purges added another million, mostly Shia and Kurd deaths. The current Sunni-Shia confrontation is estimated to have caused another 100 thousand deaths to date.

Neighboring Iran suffered between 450 thousand and 970 thousand deaths during the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war, plus unknown thousands of dissidents killed by Iran's secret police since 1979. In Syria, the late President Hafez al-Assad attacked the city of Hama in 1982, murdering 200 thousand members of the Muslim Brotherhood … not to mention one murderous action after another in Lebanon, accounting for at least 130 thousand.

The foregoing does not consider lethal activities in Chad, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Turkey, Yemen and Zanzibar, Tanzania's island province. Experts estimate up to 600 thousand mostly Muslim fatalities in these areas since 1960.

Who are the real perpetrators of genocide, the people committing these religious and ethnic cleansings -- these massacres? Who are those responsible for spilling so much Muslim blood? In the overwhelming majority of cases the killers have been and continue to be the Muslims themselves.

Indeed, if we were to leave the Iraqis on their own, it is very likely that hundreds of thousands – possibly millions – of Muslims would be killed by fellow Muslims, goaded on by Iran to the east and Syria to their west, in a full scale sectarian civil war.

Should such a tragedy occur, would the world correctly consider the United States an accomplice to genocide? In such a situation, sadly, yes.