Jews and the Military: The United States Military in Afghanistan and Iraq
Continuing our investigation into the lack of a significant jewish presence and corresponding lack of casualties in Western military forces in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: we should look to the United States' two most recent large-scale and decades-long military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.
What we should note before we discuss this however is that the jews were among some of the strongest proponents for the highly controversial military action in Iraq (1) and even at the time conservative pundits noticed that while jews were often strong proponents for military action: they were not the ones who would be doing the fighting and possibly dying as a result of the policies that they so strongly advocated. Indeed, the pundits even came up a brutal rhetorical name for the jewish proponents of war with Iraq: chicken hawks. (2)
Getting a split of how many jews died would normally be quite difficult, but the Jewish Daily Forward has been rather helpful in this regard and has asserted on the basis of its own research - conducted over several years - that fifty self-proclaimed jews were killed in these wars (as well as offering biographical sketches of them) by 2012. (3) They also helpfully list the number of United States personnel who have been killed in these two protracted wars as being 6,500 as of 2012. (4)
To bring these up to date however I have checked the casualty statistics for the United States as of this writing and the total is slightly higher at 7,041 deaths or to split them out: 4,492 in Iraq (5) (4,486 in 2012) (6) and 2,459 in Afghanistan (7) (2,117 in 2012). (8)
I haven’t been able to find an updated jewish casualty figure for 2024 but if we assume if there have only been another 348 US military deaths – nearly all in Afghanistan – between 2012 and 2024 then we may assume at best one more jew has died bringing the total to 51 out of 7,041.
The reader will once note that the number of jewish deaths as an absolute number is very low when compared to the total number. If we once against calculate the amount of jewish death rate; as a percentage of the whole, we can see that it comes to 0.77% if we use the Forward's 6,500 total killed figure from 2012 and 0.76% if we use the slighter higher figure of 6,603 that I have calculated from 2012, but we factor in the updated statistics as of 2024 using the updated death toll of 7,041 and 51 dead jews we get 0.72%.
Now again this the skeptic might say means nothing unless we understand the percentage of the jews as a population of the United States, which indicates whether the amount is disproportionate or not. If we follow the figure of the jewish population of the United States in 2011 (6,588,065) (9) and compare that to the current official estimate as to the total population of the United States in 2012 (316,615,321) (10) then we get the percentage of the United States population who are jewish as being 2.1%.
If we then update this view to 2024 we have a jewish population of the United States in 2022 of 7,387,992 (11) of the total population of the United States in 2024 of 336,315,085 (12) then we get the percentage of the United States population who are jewish as being 2.2%.
Now that this once more immediately rings intellectual alarm bells for us given that yet again - like in Vietnam war – (13) the percentage of jewish deaths is disproportionately low and is in fact more or less a third of their percentage representation of the population of the United States of America.
This quickly informs us that the 'chicken hawk' description of the jews has at least some factual substance behind it given that jews are not the ones dying for wars that substantially benefit Israel. (14) It is difficult to see what counterarguments jews and their apologists for this could use other than - what are in effect - appeals to mysticism by asserting the amount of jews is actually 40% higher or some such non-evidenced claim which comes down to magical thinking.
However, when I went through the two Forward lists of jewish dead in Iraq and Afghanistan: I found quite the opposite to be the case. Or to be more straightforward: the list is substantially padded with those who were part jewish as well some weird and whacky inclusions.
My breakdown of the list based on the information that the Forward gives in their brief biographical sketches of the jewish dead is as follows:
Full Jews: 28 dead
Jewish Father: 4 dead
Jewish Mother: 14 dead
Jewish Grandparent: 1 dead
Convert: 1 dead
Fostered by Jews: 1 dead
Black Israelite: 1 dead
As we can see just from the above list the Forward is obviously padding their list with dubious cases such as Benyahmin Yahudah who it asserts was a 'Black Israelite'. The problem with that, of course, is that the spelling of his name suggests he wasn't actually jewish in origin (it is a phonetic spelling of Benjamin Yehuda not a mistake even an Ethiopian jew would make) but rather that somewhere in the past: his family decided that they would 'become jews'.
Then we have Morris Walker - also a black man - whose grandmother - a jew living in Germany (yet another 'Holocaust Survivor' no less) - fell in love with a black American soldier just after the Second World War and married him. Even the Forward asserts that Walker 'wasn't raised in a jewish home', but instead he decided to become a jew at some stage in his short life.
Another is Zachary Fisher who wasn't jewish at all, but rather his jewish stepfather 'inspired' him to convert to Judaism. The problem with that of course is Fisher wasn't jewish (i.e., he wasn't born jewish and thus was not an Israelite by Judaism's reckoning) and wouldn't have been accepted as such by Israel based on the law of return.
Other notable entries in the list are that one full jew - Steven Shapiro - committed suicide by shooting himself while another - Dustin Schrage - drowned while swimming in a river.
Hardly battle casualties.
Further to even that we find that two members of the list - Daniel Agami and Michael Brodsky - carried Israeli flags around with them (and were Israeli patriots), while another member of the list - Daniel Freeman - was actually an Israeli and another two on the list - Shawn Pine and Elijah Tai Wah Wong (who had a Chinese father and a jewish mother) -actually served in the IDF for extended periods of time before joining the United States military. In another instance a list member's parents – those of Jeremy Kane - parents demanded that he serve in the IDF not the United States military suggesting that as jews and American citizens they were far more loyal to Israel rather than the United States.
If we understand this then we can reasonably remove the 4 somewhat whacky inclusions, which leaves us with a jewish death toll of 46. Doing this lowers the jewish percentage death rate of the total dead to some 0.71% against the Forward's 6,500 total figure and 0.7% against my total figure of 6,603.
While if we bring that number up to date to 2024 using the official death toll of 7,041 and add in the hypothesized additional jewish death in Iraq and Afghanistan so we have 47. Then we have a jewish percentage death rate of 0.7%.
Thus, not only can see that jews are disproportionately under-represented in the death toll when compared to their percentage representation in the population of the United States, but that jews have felt it necessary to pad this figure by adding those who jews themselves by enlarge wouldn't actually consider jewish.
The reason for this to my mind is very simple: the jews are very well aware that they are heavily under-represented in the death toll so in order to make it seem a little more reasonable (albeit just a tiny bit) they have scraped the bottom of the barrel to try and find anyone they could include as 'jewish' even though they normally wouldn't regard them as such. That even then they couldn't produce more than a few examples tells us how lacking jewish deaths in the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns have been.
What is even more interesting is when we look at the number of jews in the United States military as one analysis from 2008 of four different questionnaire-based surveys of United States military personnel estimated that jews comprise between 0.32% and 1.7% of said personnel with 0.32% (from the Defense Manpower Data Center survey) being significantly lower than other three (which ranged between 1.09% and 1.7%). (15)
Further we should note that for 2004 - when most of the denizens of the Forward's list perished - the Army Profile report tells us that only 2% of it (across Active service, National Guard and the Reserve) was categorised as 'Other' (i.e., Jewish etc). That said a quarter of Active service personnel didn't specify their religion (which does not mean - as some have claimed - that they were atheists but rather that they chose not to reveal what they believed in as it wasn't mandatory) compared to a third of both the National Guard and the Reserve. (16)
Now what this suggests is that the percentage represent of jews in the United States military can be estimated at about 1.2%, which is significantly disproportionately lower than the percentage representation of the jews as part of the population of the United States (i.e., 2.1% to 2.2%). This adds weight to Major Rob Levinson's assertion that he had a significant problem in finding enough jews to form a minyan (i.e. ten adult jews in order for jewish communal worship to be undertaken in accordance with Judaism) at the United States military bases that he was stationed at. (17)
Also notable is that the jewish death rate - as a percentage of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan - is about a third below their probable representation in the United States military (i.e., circa 0.7% against an estimated representation of 1.2%).
It is also worth noting that I have here used the two middle figures in the survey from 2008 in the context of 2004 split rather than use the highest finding of a 1.7% representation from the Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life. If we take the higher figure than it would mean that the jews are under-represented - in the context of their representation in the United States military - by two-thirds or approximately 66%.
What we can draw from this is the very simple point that the 'chicken hawk' jibe is not only accurate, but that it touches on a very sensitive subject for jews given that - as Gitell and Soussan were both quick to assert – (18) this charge (of jews not fighting or being willing to die for their country) was a common one made by anti-Semitic German critics of the jews before and during the Second World War.
What both Gitell and Soussan don't seem to understand is that while they may believe that the childish claim that the anything the Third Reich asserted was a lie has intellectual weight: anyone with an ounce of criticality realises that this is stupid and fundamentally - for lack of a better term - reactionary thing to claim. It is the resort of those desperate to attack something they can't bring significant evidence against and are forced to assert that it was 'wrong' because the Nazis argued it was the case.
The problem is that the data shows that the Nazis were right...
References
(1) John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, 2007, 'The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy', 1st Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, pp. 230-262
(2) http://www.jewishchronicle.org/article.php?article_id=11362
(3) http://forward.com/articles/162439/remembering-our-fallen/
(4) Ibid.
(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Coalition_military_casualties
(6) http://icasualties.org/OEF/index.aspx
(7) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_in_the_War_in_Afghanistan#All_fatalities
(8) http://icasualties.org/OEF/index.aspx
(9) http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/usjewpop1.html
(10) https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/population
(11) http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/usjewpop1.html
(12) https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/population
(13) On this see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jews-and-military-service-the-united
(14) Mearsheimer, Walt, Op. Cit., pp. 233-238; Gordon Thomas, 2012, 'Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad', 6th Edition, Thomas Dunne: New York, pp. 389-390
(15) http://militaryatheists.org/resources/MLDC-RIPSdemographics.pdf
(16) http://www.armyg1.army.mil/hr/docs/demographics/FY05%20Army%20Profile.pdf; compare to http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2009-09-08-buddhist-chaplain_N.htm
(17) http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/16640/attention-where-are-the-jews-in-the-u-s-military/
(18) http://www.jewishchronicle.org/article.php?article_id=11362; http://www.algemeiner.com/2011/07/18/jews-in-the-military/