Ted Cruz throws down on Ilhan Omar…

by The Right Scoop

It all started with this tweet from Ted Cruz yesterday, calling protesters who toppled a Christopher Columbus statue in Minnesota the “American Taliban”:

 
Ilhan Omar didn’t like Cruz’s characterization, calling it “sick”:

She also accused Columbus of “literally” starting a genocide against indigenous people.

But Ted Cruz corrects Omar, who isn’t known for caring much about facts, saying “No, he didn’t commit genocide, “literally” or otherwise. He did discover the New World, which led to colonizers, some of whom inadvertently brought disease.”

Cruz then asks “Is it your position that it’s inherently immoral to come to America from a foreign land? I’m glad my Dad came from Cuba.”

He then drops a truth bomb on her, saying “And if you want to talk “literal genocide,” we can discuss the Nazis murdering 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Why again did you oppose the House resolution against antisemitism?”

Ouch! That had to sting a lot. And as you can imagine, no response from Omar.

Just for clarification, here’s a short summary of the truth about Christopher Columbus:

Born in Genoa, Italy, Columbus was a deeply Catholic explorer who was willing to go against the grain. He believed he could reach the shores of Asia by sailing a mere 3,000 miles west across the Atlantic. Such a passage would establish faster and easier trade routes than were possible through overland travel or by sailing south and east around Africa.

Scholars of his day calculated the distance to the Orient across the Atlantic at well over 7,000 miles, out of practical range for ships of the day. Those who were skeptical of the admiral’s proposal did not hold that the earth was flat, as popular myth has suggested, but rather that it was much larger than Columbus believed. Despite his miscalculation, after 10 weeks Columbus did indeed find land — not the outskirts of the Orient, as he went to his grave believing, but an entirely new continent.

Later, as a nation began to coalesce out of the American colonies, its leaders recognized the admiral’s legacy. “Columbia” served as an informal name for what would become the United States of America. The eventual designation of the nation’s capital reflects the esteem the founders had for the Genoese explorer.

Today, one can still hear echoes of anti-Catholic prejudice in the modern attacks. For some, Columbus’ sponsorship by Spain and introduction of Christianity and Western culture to the lands he discovered make him immediately suspect. The new wave of anti-Columbus attacks go so far as to say that Columbus intended nothing good.

“These criticisms primarily charge Columbus with perpetrating acts of genocide, slavery, ‘ecocide,’ and oppression,” explained Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute and author of 1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History (1992).

Nonetheless, a closer examination of the record reveals a different picture.

“The dominant picture holds him responsible for everything that went wrong in the New World,” wrote Carol Delaney, a former professor at Stanford and Brown universities, in her book Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem (2011). In her opinion, “we must consider his world and how the cultural and religious beliefs of his time colored the way he thought and acted.”

In a 2012 Columbia interview, Delaney further explained that Columbus found the native peoples to be “very intelligent” and his relations with them “tended to be benign.” He gave strict instructions to the settlers to “treat the native people with respect,” though some of his men rebelled and disobeyed his orders, particularly during his long absences, Delaney added.

Columbus’ voyage made the Old and New Worlds aware of each other for the first time, eventually leading to the founding of new countries in the Western Hemisphere. Diseases inadvertently carried to the New World by the Europeans caused the greatest number of casualties by far, killing some 90 percent of native populations according to some estimates.

“There were terrible diseases that got communicated to the natives,” Delaney said, “but he can’t be blamed for that.”

This is from the Knights of Columbus website, a Catholic charitable organization founded in honor of Columbus in the 1800s. I figured if anyone would know the truth, it’d be them. You can read more here.


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