During the Vietnam War it was common for the US military to publish a body-bag count for the number of US soldiers killed in Vietnam per day; once the war was over the number of American soldiers killed was about 64,000, with up to 6 million civilians/soldiers having been killed in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, a kill ratio of 1 to 100, which could be achieved by Israel in the current Gaza war.
The count for Gaza is 19,000 after two months of aerial bombing. The rate of killing is about 9,000 per month. If this continues for one year expect a total count of ~ 100,000. But the West is challenging officials who use the genocide word on their campuses since it suggests that one of America's closest allies is like Vladimir Putin (who has so far killed 10,000 Ukrainian civilians). To discourage use of the genocide word, certain communities are declaring that to use such a descriptor in reference to Israel (a Jewish state) amounts to antisemitism. George Orwell should be shaking in his grave to hear such a thing.
ADL, a Jewish Anti-hate Organization has commented on this issue:
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Published: 10.25.2023 by ADL:
In the heightened rhetoric of the present day, Israel is sometimes accused of committing acts of “genocide” against the Palestinians. Genocide is a legal term, and in no way do Israeli policies and actions meet this legal threshold. Rather, the sensationalist use of the term genocide in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not only inaccurate and misleading, but it serves to demonize the State of Israel and to diminish recognized acts of genocide.
The term genocide was first introduced by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, with the construct of “genos” meaning race or tribe and “cide” meaning killing. Lemkin coined the term in response to the Holocaust, but also in reference to earlier events, including the Armenian Genocide. The United Nations General Assembly recognized genocide as a crime under international law in 1946 and it was codified in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. The definition of genocide under this convention is:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
While one may oppose and even condemn particular Israeli policies or actions with regard to Palestinians or Israel’s Arab citizens, the fact remains that in no way has Israel engaged in any action with the intent to exterminate, in whole or in part, the Palestinian people.
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Having to worry about Hitler's intentions after exterminating six million Jewish people, it could never be concluded that what he did was 3rd degree murder (i.e., manslaughter, an accident of War) which is what is being declared by Israel vis-à-vis Gaza. But it will be the West who will win the war against Hamas, which means it will also win to document (or not document) the history of this war. It is notable that the amount of text devoted to the Vietnam War for the US citizenship exam is several lines of text (not more than 15), a war that was very damaging to the US, requiring a massive amnesic lobotomy, so that the killing instinct of the American boy (and now girl) would be restored for the campaigns in Iraq/Afghanistan and soon for those of the south Pacific, if Biden and Xi’s Neocons have their way.
Dear Edward J Tehovnik
I am inclined to say that there is no comparison between the Vietnam War and the wars of present days. First, today’s wars are often between armed groups (not states), sometimes even between private armed groups what significantly complicates the question of liability for actions taken during the war. Second, as regards the Vietnam War, this war was lost primarily in the US media. At the end of the war, Vietnam had no one left to fight. The Vietnamese soldiers who entered Saigon were teenagers.
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