B. J. Sabri is an Iraqi-American antiwar activist (see: http://www.onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/printer_856.shtml ).
B.J. Sabri on Iraqi Holocaust (2006): “Did the United States, under the pretext of “liberating” Kuwait from the Iraqi occupation, engineer and execute an Iraqi holocaust to implement, consolidate, and entrench American imperialism in Iraq, and the Middle East?
By judging from the scale of destruction and death the United States inflicted on Iraq, and by considering the international and regional objectives of war, history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East since the 1930s, control of oil, Israel, U.S.-Israel relations, the answer is yes.
Even so, to back up the charge that the United States committed a holocaust in Iraq, an investigation on the meaning of the term: holocaust is indispensable.
As a first step, to qualify the human destruction in Iraq consequent to the Gulf War as a holocaust, we have to dispense at once with all preposterous differentiations that American imperialism assigns to the use of the term or to any other taxonomic categories of mass violence. Second, to debunk completely the imperialist practice that restricts the application of the holocaust concept to specific events but not to others, a discussion on the use of language and derived political vocabulary is in order.
In language, synonyms do not change the basic meaning of a word. Take for example, the words, kill, slay, destroy, slaughter, or exterminate. They all mean the same: take life. Yet, the one subtlety that distinguishes each term is the imagery associated with the given taxonomy.
What these terms would not tell is the magnitude of those who died. Accepted contemporary definitions resolved this problem by adding either the qualifier: mass (as in mass destruction) to indicate lethal violence against large groups, peoples, or nations; by inventing names based on Roman derivation such as genocide; or by reviving the ancient Hellenic term: holocaust.
Before the first Iraqi holocaust (1991), there were many other large-scale holocausts committed by marauding, colonialist, and imperialist polities. Among these were Mongolian hordes in Asia and Eastern Europe; European and American colonialism in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, and Africa; Ottomans against Armenians; Germans against Jehovah witnesses, Jews, Romanies, communists, etc.; Japanese against Chinese and Koreans; Israelis against Palestinians; and the United States against Koreans, Vietnamese, and Panamanians.
A holocaust, as an expression of humanity gone dastardly and violently bestial, should have neither trophy nor primacy over other despicable events of mass violence. Still, the Iraqi holocaust is prominent among all other holocausts for one distinguishing feature: the United States planned for it with the acquiescence of other colonialist powers of the U.N. Security Council, and with financing from Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and other American vassals.
In the end, and for the first time in history, there has been a “legalized” consensus to perform a holocaust, a fundraising to finance it, and a deadline to start it.“ [1].
[1]. B.J. Sabri, “”, The splendid failure of occupation. Part 45: How the U.S. engineered the Iraqi Holocaust”, Online Journal, 31 May 2006: http://www.onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/printer_856.shtml .