In an October 25 press conference, a reporter posed a question to Joe Biden that included the point that “Hamas killed 1,400 Israelis, the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry says Israeli forces have killed over 6,000 Palestinians, including 2,700 children…” In response, Biden refused to recognize those figures for Palestinian deaths (which are widely recognized as being valid), saying, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.” Then he said, “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.”

Biden’s words are criminal, nothing but criminal whitewashing and greenlighting of Israel’s genocidal war and further U.S. justification for even more death and destruction being brought down on the Palestinian people. Biden calls to mind Malcolm X’s quote from the 1960s:

Uncle Sam, with the blood of your and mine mothers and fathers on his hands, with the blood dripping down his jaws like a bloody-jawed wolf—and still got the nerve to point his finger at other countries. 

In fact, when it comes to mass killings of innocent people here and around the world, America has no rival. The following are only a few examples:

1. Massacres of Native Peoples. To name just two among many: From 1838-1839, the U.S. military force-marched approximately 15,000 Cherokee and 2,000 Black slaves from Cherokee lands in Georgia, 800 miles to the new “Indian Territory” in an area that later became Oklahoma. It has been estimated that 2,500-4,000 people died on what became known as The Trail of Tears. On December 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek, U.S. soldiers massacred nearly 300 of the 350 Lakota men, women, and children on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. 

2. War on Mexico. On May 13, 1846, the United States Congress voted overwhelmingly to declare war on Mexico. And so began a war that resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of lives and the theft by the U.S. of more than half of Mexico's land.

3. War of Conquest in the Philippines. From 1899 to 1902, over 126,000 U.S. troops were sent to put down the war of independence in the Philippines and against the population as a whole. It is estimated that between 250,000 and one million Filipinos were killed in this war—in combat and through disease and famine.

4. Nuclear Bombs Dropped on Cities. On August 6, 1945, the U.S. exploded the first nuclear bomb over the center of Hiroshima, Japan, a city of 350,000. By the end of 1945, between 140,000 and 150,000 people, overwhelmingly civilians, had perished in Hiroshima and hundreds of thousands more were wounded. Three days later, on August 9, the U.S. dropped an even more powerful nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, destroying the city and murdering another 70,000 people. 

5. Korean War. In 1950, under the auspices of the United Nations, 340,000 troops—90 percent American—intervened in Korea as part of the U.S. effort to encircle the Soviet Union and China, which at that time were socialist countries. U.S. planes “carpet-bombed” North Korea with more than a half million tons of bombs. Millions of civilians were killed.

6. Vietnam War. America’s genocidal war in Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s resulted in at least two to three million Vietnamese deaths and possibly as many as four million. 5.3 million were injured, and 11 million were displaced from their homes. 

7. Guatemalan Massacre. In the early 1980s, following a U.S.-backed coup by General José Efraín Ríos Montt, the Guatemalan military systematically destroyed more than 600 indigenous Mayan villages in the highlands of the country. Over 200,000 people, overwhelmingly Mayans, were killed or "disappeared" under Ríos Montt in this small, impoverished country in Central America. 

8. Shooting Down Iranian Passenger Plane. On July 3, 1988, an Iranian passenger plane was making a routine flight across the Persian Gulf with 290 passengers and crew aboard. Without warning, the U.S. warship Vincennes fired two cruise missiles that destroyed the plane, killing everyone on board.

9. War and Sanctions Against Iraq. In the 1991 U.S. war against Iraq, an estimated 70,000 to 200,000 civilians died. Crippling sanctions—a form of economic warfare—imposed on Iraq from 1990 to 2003 caused widespread disease and malnutrition^, causing civilian deaths estimated as high as 1.5 million, including more than 500,000 children under five years old.

10. Bombings of Afghanistan. Between 2004 and 2018, U.S.-led forces dropped 38,000 bombs on Afghanistan. By 2020 the U.S. had conducted at least 13,000 drone strikes, most of these in the countryside. The U.S. claimed that it put tremendous effort into avoiding civilian casualties, but in reality thousands of civilians died as a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation.

Again, note that these are only some of the many, many unjust wars waged by the United States that resulted in millions of innocent people being killed.