San Bernardino

Media and message board posters continue to focus on gun laws in the aftermath of latest example of Islamic terror.

Yeah, because the lack of a gun would stop a motivated Jihadist from attempting a murderous attack. See 9/11, Boston Marathon bombing, attempted Times Square bombing, and more.

 

I thought most of that happened after the various Europeans landed, from Columbus on.

I doubt it takes into account selling the Indians blankets that carried smallpox either.

 

With just a bit of editing, you wind up with the basis for a seminar* series at an Ivy League university.


*Call it an ovular series and you can get extra funding from the diversity office.

 

Columbus never set foot on the mainland of America. But, yes, disease resulting from earlier contact with Europeans killed off a large percentage of the Native population in what is today Massachusetts/Cape Cod/etc.

Good God man. That theory had been discredited.

 

It is the mix of the personal and the socio-religio that makes this case different. It is not like ideologically motivated terrorists to commit an atrocity where their motivation is in official doubt hours after the fact. If this is a religiously inspired or justified acting out of a revenge fantasy, what exactly is it?

 

It will be interesting to get the facts on this one. They shot up a Christmas party at his work. What triggered that? His religion versus the largely Christian workplace? Had he caught hell as a Moslem, or just gotten tired of hearing all Moslems trashed over the actions of a few? Or was this something completely unrelated to any of the various narratives floating around? This is a really weird one, at least at this point in our ignorance of the facts.

 

Michael Medved has written extensively about the "Smallpox Blanket" myth:

Obviously, the decimation of native population by European germs represents an enormous tragedy, but in no sense does it represent a crime. Stories of deliberate infection by passing along "small-pox blankets" are based exclusively on two letters from British soldiers in 1763, at the end of the bitter and bloody French and Indian War. By that time, Indian populations (including those in the area) had already been terribly impacted by smallpox, and there's no evidence of a particularly devastating outbreak as a result of British policy.

For the most part, Indians were infected by devastating diseases even before they made direct contact with Europeans: other Indians who had already been exposed to the germs, carried them with them to virtually every corner of North America and many British explorers and settlers found empty, abandoned villages (as did the Pilgrims) and greatly reduced populations when they first arrived.

http://townhall.com/columnists/mich...e_genocide_against_native_americans/page/full


“Smallpox Blankets” and Biological Warfare

But didn’t British authorities, and later the Americans, show criminal intent when they deliberately infected innocent tribes with the deadliest of eighteenth-century diseases? Whenever callers to my radio show begin talking about the premeditated mass slaughter of Native Americans, it’s only a matter of seconds before they invoke the diabolical history of “smallpox blankets” — the bedding and clothing cunningly provided to unsuspecting tribes in order to infect them with the variola major virus…

Amazingly, the notion persists that the unimaginable devastation brought about by this disease stemmed from elaborate and brilliantly executed schemes devised by mass murderers — at a time when even the most sophisticated physicians possessed no real understanding of germ theory…

The horribly misleading charges about germ warfare have achieved a monstrous life of their own, leaving many (if not most) Americans with the impression that diseases that decimated native populations resulted from a conscious, long-standing policy of the U.S. government. No such master plan for mass murder ever existed, of course, so that all efforts to scour abundant bureaucratic records have produced only a few nasty postscripts in letters from British — not American — officials in 1763, and the largely exculpatory evidence concerning an epidemic in Mandan territory in 1837…

Michael Medved: Native American "Genocide"

 

I give you that well known liberal mouthpiece, history.org.

Colonial Germ Warfare : The Colonial Williamsburg Official History & Citizenship Site

"During Pontiac's uprising in 1763, the Indians besieged Fort Pitt. They burned nearby houses, forcing the inhabitants to take refuge in the well-protected fort. The British officer in charge, Captain Simeon Ecuyer, reported to Colonel Henry Bouquet in Philadelphia that he feared the crowded conditions would result in disease. Smallpox had already broken out. On June 24, 1763, William Trent, a local trader, recorded in his journal that two Indian chiefs had visited the fort, urging the British to abandon the fight, but the British refused. Instead, when the Indians were ready to leave, Trent wrote: "Out of our regard for them, we gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect."

"It is not known who conceived the plan, but there's no doubt it met with the approval of the British military in America and may have been common practice. Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander of British forces in North America, wrote July 7, 1763, probably unaware of the events at Fort Pitt: "Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them." He ordered the extirpation of the Indians and said no prisoners should be taken. About a week later, he wrote to Bouquet: "You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race."

 

Like John Kerry, looking for a rational ewe can relate to.

Islam is the rational for Jihad. That's it.

We don't look for a rationale when some nut shoots up an abortion clinic. We don't ask what we did wrong to trigger him.

There's nothing we can do, or change, about our society that will appease Islamists.

And, I don't know of any non-violent anti-abortionist being driven to murder by the depiction of his fellow ant-abortion activists as murders.

 

We should probably not have tried to discourage drunk driving or conquer disease because some drunks and some diseases are always going to slip through.

 

Because that's where the great majority of murder occurs in the US. It's not that hard.

 

Yeah. And All Columbus did was kill or dismember the natives who refused to give him gold or become slaves.