Killing members of the group.
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
For perspective, a brief look at some low-lights of the American Holocaust is in order:
While difficult to determine with certainty, conservative estimates place the Native American population at 5 million when Columbus was credited with discovering the Western Hemisphere. A decrease of 95% (to 250,000) by 1900 demonstrates the severity of the genocide committed by the European invaders and ultimately the US government.
In 1637 the Puritans of the Connecticut Valley murdered close to six hundred unarmed Pequots, and in the words of their minister, Increase Mather, "sent six hundred heathen souls to hell". Other significant massacres of noncombatant Native Americans throughout America's history include the Gnadenhutten Massacre in 1782, the Chehaw Affair in 1818, the Battle of Bad Axe in 1832, and the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890.
As the European conquerors sought to satiate their seemingly endless appetite for more land, they displaced many indigenous people from their homelands, disrupting their ability to cope and to maintain their culture. With the advent of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the US military began utilizing force of arms to move aboriginal people westward to free up land for the "more deserving" whites. Perhaps the best known and most tragic of these "evictions" was the Trail of Tears, in which 4,000 Cherokees died during their forced march from their homeland. The Cherokees had schools, businesses, and a system of government modeled after that of the United States, but these "savages" were still "unworthy" to possess their land. Ultimately the Indian Removal Act resulted in the US government forcing 100,000 Native Americans west of the Mississippi River.
In an effort to assimilate Native Americans into their "superior culture", white settlers separated children from their parents and put them into boarding schools. There the Native American children had little alternative but to abandon their beliefs, mode of dress, language and other cultural aspects in favor of Christianity, English and Western ideals. Understandably, many of these children suffered from depression or fled from these horrid institutions. Native Americans did not regain the right to self-determination until the 1960's. While Native American populations have risen significantly since, the poverty rate for Native Americans was 27% in 2000, compared with an overall US poverty level of 13.9%. Perhaps more troubling, 7% of Native American pre-teen school age children were not even enrolled in school.
American Genocide II: Aiding, Abetting and Taming the Wild, Wild West Bank
In the Middle East, the United States bears significant responsibility for many atrocities committed against innocent civilian populations. The US military has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians directly. US support of ruthless dictators like the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein (before he became our "sworn enemy") has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands more denizens of the Middle East. Wealthy and influential Zionist individuals and organizations (i.e. AIPAC) have ensured the US support of the Israeli squatters in Palestine. The US government has been complicit in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians to enable the Zionists to realize their objective to drive the last vestiges of their own "indigenous savages" from "Zionist land". Providing obscene amounts of financial support to Israel and utilizing its power as a member on the Security Council to nullify UN efforts to intervene in the Palestinian crisis are perhaps the US government's most horrendous crimes (and morally reprehensible acts) in the Middle East. Not only are they participating in acts of state terrorism and murder, they are also abetting the eradication of an entire ethnic group.
Consider this brief overview of the Palestinians' plight:
Admittedly, throughout human history, the Jewish people have been persecuted and I feel compassion for them. However, some of them responded by determining that they needed their own sovereign state and founded the Zionist movement in the late Nineteenth Century. Palestine became their target site for their "homeland" as they viewed it as "a land without people for a people without land". Regardless of the Jewish plight, there was a significant moral flaw in the Zionists' goal. Palestine was a "land with people".
In 1917, Great Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, a letter to the Zionist Federation, in which it stated British support of the Zionists' "national home" in Palestine and that the British would employ their "best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this objective". At the close of World War I, Palestine became a British "mandate" as the Western powers divided up the former Ottoman Empire.
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