Note to my fellow Americans who wouldn’t vote for Kamala Harris because she was “Genocide Joe’s” Veep — and to the Arab American Muslim mayor who endorsed Donald Trump in part because he said he believed Trump would stop the fighting in the Middle East:
“President Donald Trump ... proposed that the United States take a ‘long-term ownership position’ over Gaza, moving its residents to a ‘good, fresh, beautiful piece of land’ in another country and developing the war-torn territory under U.S. control, offering a vision of mass displacement likely to inflame sentiments in the Arab world.” – The Washington Post, Feb. 4.
Except for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a Trump bestie, no other world leader has hopped on the Make Gaza American bandwagon. Not even all Israelis support Trump’s plan.
No matter, the president says his plan could turn the blood-soaked, bomb-blasted hellscape that is now Gaza into the “the Riviera of the Middle East” – doubtless complete with a Trump hotel, casino, and golf course or two, which is, of course, the point of Trump’s proposal.
Millions of people across our country and around the world think Trump’s plan is off-the-charts bonkers and baffling.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va) spoke for we-the-bewildered-masses when he confessed: “I don’t know where this came from.”
This historian has an idea.
A bronze equestrian statue of President Andrew Jackson again rears up from the credenza behind Trump’s Oval Office desk. A portrait of Old Hickory is back hanging on a wall.
Forty-seven is a big fan of Seven, a Tennessee Democrat and wealthy slaveholder who said Native Americans stood in the way of white settlement — and thwarted the spread of the South’s peculiar institution — between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. He was especially keen on expelling the five big Southern tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole.
So Jackson opted to banish the trans-Appalachian tribes. The policy was called “Indian Removal,” a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.
In 1830 he coaxed Congress into approving the Indian Removal Act. Jackson touted the legislation in his annual message to Congress. He said the measure was a boon for removers and the removed.
According to the president, the act would “place a dense and civilized population in large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters. ... It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the States; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers, and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community.”
To “protect” the Native Americans, Uncle Sam set aside the “Indian Territory,” Oklahoma today. Why there? Oklahoma was part of the trans-Mississippi West, a vast region dubbed the “Great American Desert,” because it was thought to be a barren wasteland unsuitable for white settlement. (It really wasn’t an American Sahara, and nobody knew about the oil in the future Sooner State.)
The Cherokees were the last to go. The Army rounded up an estimated 19,000 men, women, and children, and force marched them to their new unwanted home. About 2,000 perished of disease in crowded, unsanitary detention camps. Another 2,000 to 3,000 died along the grueling, months-long, 800-mile trek of 1838-1839 they dubbed the “Trail of Tears” — or soon after arrival, according to the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“The cost in human life cannot be accurately measured in suffering, not even roughly measured,” Howard Zinn wrote of the ethnic cleansing in his People’s History of the United States.
The Indian Removal Act barely passed the House and faced fierce opposition in the Senate led by Theodore Frelinghuysen, a New Jersey National Republican. In a long impassioned speech, he declared, “However mere human policy, or the law of power, or the tyrant’s plea of expediency, may have found it convenient at any or in all times to recede from the unchangeable principles of eternal justice, no argument can shake the political maxim, that, where the Indian always has been, he enjoys an absolute right still to be, in the free exercise of his own modes of thought, government, and conduct ... ”
Palestinians in their homeland deserve not a scintilla less.
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| Tip Jars |
