Really? I thought they heartless marauders who came here and seized the Indians’ land, then systematically decimated their populations by deliberately infecting them with smallpox.
Anyway, Huffington Post’s Igor Bobic offers a heartwarming reminder that this coming Thursday, when we’re not busy giving thanks for eight years of Barack Obama (did someone say smallpox?), we should all remember that the pilgrims were refugees, too.
Except of course that they weren’t. They came here not to flee oppression, as the current waves of Syrians are attempting to do, but as expeditions during the Age of Exploration. In fact, the European crews who came here in the fifteenth century had no expectation that they would find anyone living in the “new world.”
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
More importantly, this attempt to exploit an American holiday to serve the argument that welcoming refugees is an act of Christian charity is weak tea, and one built on a foundation of straw at that. As Weasel Zippers glibly notes in response to the HuffPo piece, “I don’t recall any stories about the pilgrims self-detonating.”
